HRV The Nervous System Metric Nobody Talks About (And Why That's Dangerous) with Salim Najjar

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a sixteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You said that HRV is the language of the body. How did that help us understand what's actually happening inside?

Salim
If it is measuring that gap or variance between each beat, let's say your heart rate is 72. HRV is the measure of each of that variance between the 72 in a minute. The higher variance between each of the beats, it indicates a more malleable and resilient nervous system that could handle the ever changing environment that we are always seeing. And just like there's no two fingerprints in the world that are the same, there's actually no two heartbeats in the world that are the same. Meaning your HRV score is solely meant just for you.

Salim, welcome to podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Mark. Truly a pleasure.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So good to be with you. You've been coaching me on my HRV Mhmm. Which I appreciate because I got work to do. Mhmm. And for those of you listening who don't know what HRV is, it's means heart rate variability.

And we're gonna get into what that means, why it's important, how it's a reflection of your nervous system state, and why you need to pay attention to it so you can actually improve your overall well-being and health and longevity and all the things we care about. So, Salim, for someone who's first hearing about HRB, what is it, and and what is it actually measuring? Great question. So HRV

Salim
stands for heart rate variability, and it's measuring the gap or the variance between each of your heartbeats. And what that gap is indicating is how your nervous system and heart is perceiving its ever changing environment. So essentially, your relationship to your stress and a direct reflection of the health of your autonomic nervous system and its ability to shift from a sympathetic to a parasympathetic state.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So essentially, it's like, if if we're trying to say, like, I'm stressed

Salim
Yep.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like, what's the biomarker of stress? You know, you can check your cortisol level, and that that can be helpful. And I do salivary cortisol testing, but that's a little bit cumbersome pain in the ass, and it's not really a day to day metric you can follow and track. But now with all these devices and wearables, we're actually able to measure this, and there's no things you can do. It's like a computer.

I mean, I I was involved with heart math a long time ago that it was very much about this. And I remember at Canyon Ranch when I was working there thirty years ago, we actually were measuring heart variability on all our all our patients. And it was, like, fascinating to see, you know, what happened and over time. This is a this is an important biomarker, so something people can look track, and measure for themselves, and and then create changes in their life to actually improve their stress resilience. Absolutely.

Tell me why why this has become more of a hot topic. Why is HRB now a thing? Is it just so we can measure it, or are the scientists and longevity researchers paying more attention to it? Like, what why should they care?

Salim
Yeah. Well, it's great to hear that you were measuring it and knowing about it thirty years ago. It's been around forever. Right? But I think now, because of what science has proven, which we were talking about this earlier, science has proven that the root cause of all aging, disease, and eventually death is cellular inflammation.

Right? If you peel the onion back enough, I know you and doctor Eric Verdon were talking about this on a recent podcast, cellular inflammation is at the underlying cause of all mortality. Mhmm. Science has also proven that the number one leading cause of that cellular inflammation, chronic stress, meaning prolonged sympathetic activation, which we call chronic stress.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yep.

Salim
So if you care at all about longevity, then being aware of your internal state, being aware of if you're in a prolonged stressful state is important, and guess what? HIV is a biomarker reflecting the health of your internal state. So that's why it's becoming a thing now, which I am so so deeply grateful for.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I think I think I just wanna double click on what you said around chronic stress, because stress is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there are many good stresses that we call hormesis, which we'll get into, which are stresses that don't kill you, that make you stronger. And most throughout most of our evolutionary history, humans have only been subjected to acute stresses. It comes and it goes.

Salim
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And there was a a wonderful book written by crazy wild scientist from Stanford, Robert Sapolsky, who has been on the podcast called why zebras don't get ulcers. And basically, the thesis is that zebras just go about eating their food, and then the lion comes and they run like crazy as fast as they can to to escape the lion until the lion catches one of them. Mhmm. And then the lion goes about eating their friend, and they just kinda go back to eating the grass and chill. Mhmm.

And so they've gotten all the the stress out of their system. Yep. And and we don't do that. We just have this unremitting chronic prolonged stress from the way we live, from the lack of our circadian rhythms, from the living in doors, from not being in nature, from not having good relationships, from eating crappy food, which makes our body stressed. I mean, there's so many reasons.

So we have way more to deal with than we ever had. And I think that, you know, people don't really have a clear idea of how to shift that, but there's meditation, there's yoga, there's breath work, there's all these tools. But we you talk about HRB in a little bit of a different way than most people. You talk about this idea of sort of nervous system regulation, nervous system sovereignty. I don't really know what that means, and why does it matter more than regulation?

Because you seem to have, like, a little bit of a a thing about regulation. Yeah.

Salim
I love the question, and it's I love nervous system regulation. I love that people are talking about it, people are aware of it. That's kind of what we hear in the ether so much. Mhmm. But what I've come to find in my own journey is I believe as humans, we did not come here to be regulated all the time.

And if we're regulated all the time, we actually can't increase the capacity and resilience of our nervous system to go handle more stress Mhmm. Or to go have a bigger impact on the world. Mhmm. So what I've come to find is more important is awareness of your internal state, agency over your internal state, and that's what sovereignty is, being aware. So that way, when a stress happens, you have the ability to consciously choose how you want to respond to that stress versus automatically responding based on an old program, a prior story, a stuck belief from your limbic brain, because that's actually how the nervous system works physiologically.

Right? It is just programmed to react when the mind perceives a stress. Mhmm. So sovereignty or agency over your internal state allows you to be aware that we're in a stressful state, and if we so choose, get ourselves out of it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So it's essentially a way for us to kind of recalibrate

Salim
with awareness. 100%.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Instead of just being in it. Yes. A friend of mine talks about this idea of being in it, but not of it. Most times we're in it and we're of it

Salim
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which means we're like in the kind of unconscious swirl of our life rather than stepping out and going, hey. Is this is this the right response for me in this situation? How do I get back to a more authentic, maybe call it sovereign way of relating to my own experience rather than being constantly in a state of trigger or stress or reaction? And it and you're you're kind of inviting people to kind of pay attention to this metric as a way to as a doorway into understanding their own biology and how it's affecting them.

Salim
As a compass to what their body actually is resonant with versus what the story that they're playing out is. Right? Because we're just projecting these stuck emotions, these stories from the past. Your your beautiful analogy of a zebra. Right?

They shake it off. They move that emotion, and an emotion on a quantum level is literally just frequency. It's energy. They move it out, so that they're Exactly. So they're not stuck to that story, and then they can live in the present moment, which all that is.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I I actually remember being in Africa and seeing this. I'm like, wow.

Salim
Was The

Dr. Mark Hyman
lion was right there. I was there. And the and the, like, zebras and stuff were all there, and they're just eating one of

Salim
these big chili.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Zebras are just, like, hanging out with a lion Yep. While he's eating another zebra. Yep. It was wild. And they're not freaked out or anything.

And it was I mean, I'd be pretty freaked out. Know? Maybe he's like, wants an appetizer or dessert or something. You know? I I wanna kind of double click on the idea of of, the biology of of this chronic stress and why why why the HRV metric is so important, and why understanding how how to use it and regulate it and and actually reset it is important.

But before we do that, I I kinda wanted people to understand when you say chronic stress drives inflammation a cellular level, like, that's a that's a big mouthful. Mhmm. Can you kinda unpack that and what's actually going on and how it works?

Salim
Absolutely. And as as an engineer, when I understood that, that science has proven that, I needed to understand why. How? What is happening internally, physiologically? Right?

Mhmm. And that has everything to do with, again, the autonomic nervous system, which is such an intricate system that governs 90% of our voluntary and involuntary function, meaning our heart rate, our breath, our digestion, our reproduction. All of these vital organs are being governed by this incredible electrical system that we know so little about that we're not fully aware of. Mhmm. Mhmm.

And if we look at evolution, which you talked about a little bit, right, evolution is always happening for us, for our survival, and we evolved at creating this sympathetic activated state for our survival. Because for most of human evolution, we didn't have the luxury, like you said, of homes, of running water, of food, and so we had real life or death threats, like a predator, or like the weather. So our brilliant bodies develop this sympathetic activation to support that survival. So what's happening internally? If the mind perceives an external threat, the amygdala fires off, and all of these signals go to the organs.

Our eyes dilate to let in more light. Our saliva production slows down, which you may not think is a big deal. I know you know it's a big deal because that's where all nutrient absorption comes in. Right? Our heart rate goes up.

Our lungs slow down. But most importantly, all of the vital oxygenated blood that's normally flowing to our visceral organs, meaning our lungs, our digestion, our reproduction, it gets diverted to our extremities, to our hands and legs You're the to support run, fighting, freezing, which is brilliant if we need to run from a tiger. Right? But back for most of our evolution, that would happen for an hour, maybe two, and then we do what you just said all the zebras were doing, Relax. Right?

Fast forward to today, we wake up from our deepest parasympathetic state of sleep, we look at our phone, we read an email, we get in an argument, and we go into a mind made perceived stressful state for eight, ten, twelve hours a day, day over day, week over week. So what is happening internally, all of that vital oxygenated blood is flowing here instead of our visceral organs, so they can't maintain the homeostasis in the body, they can't repair, and downstream of that, cellular inflammation begins. And when my mind realized that that's what was happening internally, was like, oh, shit. I really need to be aware of if my mind is perceiving a threat, even if it's just an email, and then get my body out of it, at least temporarily, so all that oxygen can go back here, and my organs can maintain the homeostasis in the body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's so important. And I think the quote that I once heard that really kind of stuck with me about the definition of stress, It made so much sense to me. Stress is defined as the real or imagined, and this is a big one for most of us.

Salim
I'd for

Dr. Mark Hyman
most what's imagined. Yep. Yep. The real or imagined threat to our body or our ego. So it can be a real threat to your body like a lion chasing you.

Salim
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Or it can be an imagined threat to your ego like you think your husband came home late from work because he's having an affair, but actually he was just going to buy you flowers. Right? And so you have this whole spin out, and the body registers it all exactly the same 100 like a life threatening emergency that you have to

Salim
gear up for. Totally. And the thing I wanna double click on is you said so beautifully, stress, this is how I call it too, it's your actually best friend and ally if you learn to dance with it and not stay in it. Because we didn't say stress was the number one leading cause of inflammation, cellular inflammation. We said chronic stress, staying in that prolonged stressful state, in that story, in whatever you're perceiving.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You kind of mentioned the sympathetic nervous system, and this sort of chronic stress as being the problem. What what's the other part of our nervous system, the parasympathetic, and how does that work, and how do they kind of work together?

Salim
The other side of the autonomic nervous system branch is the parasympathetic side, known as the rest or digest, and this operates in three primary stages, and what's so important about this is they correlate with our developmental years. Right? It's where our nervous system foundation is being built. So we start out with the delta state, when your brain is oscillating between point five and four hertz, and that's synonymous with sleep, when it's a total reset on the nervous system, and it also correlates to babies when they come out the womb for about the first, they say, twelve to eighteen months. Their baseline brainwave state is delta, and their nervous system foundation is being built.

Right? They're so susceptible to all energies and nervous systems around them. Mhmm. Then, we go to the theta state, known as that meditative between conscious and unconscious state, when your brain is oscillating between four and eight hertz, and you are a sponge. You are hypnotic, susceptible to all energies around, and this is the important one for our youth because it correlates to the ages two to seven that we call our formative years because they quite literally form us.

We don't have a prefrontal cortex developed at that time, so we don't have the ability to discern reality ourselves. So if a caregiver or parent yells or does something unintentionally, our body doesn't know how to process that emotion, and it gets stuck in the body because we just literally absorb it. There's an incredible book, The Body Keeps Score, that literally talks about how we're like grown ups living in this adult meat suit, just projecting all of our stuck emotions and stories. Yeah. Then you go to the third, the alpha state of the parasympathetic side, known as the flow state, right, like into an athlete in their zone.

This is when the brain is oscillating between eight and fourteen hertz. The monkey mind is quiet, you're focused on one thing, you're awake and alert, but quiet, and you are still susceptible. Right? This correlates with the ages of seven to 14, which is when we send children to school, because your prefrontal cortex is being developed, and you have the ability to retain all of that information. So that's the parasympathetic side.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What's really interesting to me, and as I've sort of studied all this over years, is that the sympathetic activation happens automatically. Like, you you don't really have to go into that on purpose. You don't go, oh, there's a tiger chasing me. I need to go get into a stress response so I can run. It just happens in an instant, like, almost almost milliseconds.

And most of us have felt that. If you're almost, like, in a car accident or something, you you get that, like, whatever jolt. Your body just goes boom. What I realized is that entering into a parasympathetic state is a very deliberate active process. It's not something that just happens to you.

And often, we can go through life never reaching that state. In a way, this is why HRV is so important because it it is an indirect indicator of the health of your autonomic nervous system and the way you regulate between stress and relaxation or between sympathetic and parasympathetic response.

Salim
Your agility.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yep. It's it's like the flexibility. And we, you know, we know, for example, that if you look at at people who are chronically ill, they have very low heart rate variability. If you look at heart failure patients, they have very low heart rate variability.

The most healthy heart rate is the most complex. The simplest heart rate is the most dangerous. Other words, a flat line.

Salim
Yep. Beep beep beep beep beep beep. Right. A few FMV. Flat line.

Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so what we see is in in heart failure patients, actually when they when they look at their HRV, it's quite low. And then one of the interesting things I saw in science years ago that kinda got my attention was that if you do saunas in heart failure patients, they actually increase their HRV. Yeah. Wow. And so there there's a lot of tools to regulate HRV.

We're gonna get into all those, but you kind of need you to kinda help us understand what's actually happening with HRV because it's it's described as the beat to beat variability. In other words, your heart rate isn't, like, 72. It's 71 and a quarter. It's 69 and a third. It's seventy three and four eights.

It's like and it's the more that is happening Yeah. The healthier you are. But if it's, like, seventy two seventy two seventy two seventy two, that's bad. Yeah. So that's kind of the simple way of thinking about it.

But, like, you've you've said that HRV is the language of the body. How does that help us understand what's actually happening inside?

Salim
If it is measuring that gap or variance between each beat let's say your heart rate is 72. That means it's beating 72 beats per minute, and HRV is the measure of each of that variance between the 72 and a minute. Meaning, it is so variable and changes so much. So it's not about your real time HRV, because that's fluctuating 72 times in a minute, and you want it to be variable. Right?

So what is important is the higher variance between each of the beats, it indicates a more malleable and resilient nervous system that could handle the ever changing environment that we are always seeing. Right? On the flip side, a lower variance, meaning less of a gap between each beat, indicates a more rigid nervous system, and that which is rigid eventually breaks. So that's that analogy you said, like, a a death patient connected to harmony. You hear beep beep beep beep right before they go.

There's no variation between that beep. That's not what you want. Right? Rigidity will lead to breaking. So that's what's super important.

Now knowing that, everyone's like, okay. Well, then what is a good HRV score?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right?

Salim
Yeah. The question and this is where science, which has researched us for so long, has yet to publish a range. The only thing that they have said scientifically is that it is so uniquely individualized to the person. And just like there's no two fingerprints in the world that are the same, there's actually no two heartbeats in the world that are the same. Meaning, your HRV score is solely meant just for you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You said that yours was like 32, and you increased it to a 100 by doing practices. Right? So you're you could change it.

Salim
Yeah. And we'll get into that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So I can't change my fingerprints,

Salim
but I can change my HRV. You could you could train your HRV. Right? But me training it to a 100, a 170 doesn't mean that you're Wait. Are you

Dr. Mark Hyman
a 170

Salim
now? I I got to a 170. You you know that. And I'm not that now, and we'll get into why that's what matters. Because, it's unlike

Dr. Mark Hyman
I have a few. Want a few. Yeah. Just You're like 50.

Salim
I want to give you all. You know that. You know that. What's more important, right, is to utilize this biomarker as a language. Right?

And this is what I'm trying to share with the world. And when you think of languages, you don't think English is better than Spanish is better than French. Right? The what's the intent of a language? A language, the intention is for an ecosystem within a community to communicate.

Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Salim
The sole intent of your HRV score is only for your nervous system, for doctor Mark Hyman's body to communicate with you. Mhmm. Right? The second you compare it to my 100, or to a number you need to chase, what are you doing? If HRV is measuring how your nervous system is perceiving its reality Mhmm.

Right, how do we perceive our reality? Through our senses, through our touch, through our taste, through our smell, through our eyes, through your ears, but most of all, through our thoughts. Yeah. Through our relationship to our environment. And if you are relating to you thinking you have a low HRV score and Salim has a high HRV score, what are you telling your nervous system?

You're not good enough. You need to be better. And so what's gonna happen? It's that's gonna

Dr. Mark Hyman
what I'm telling myself. It's

Salim
gonna stay in this quote, unquote lower thing. So, yes, a higher HIV is a healthier nervous system, but higher for me is totally different than higher for you, is totally different for higher than whoever is listening. So that's why I like to look at your HRV baseline. Yeah. And I define your HRV baseline as your average HRV score over the last thirty days.

That is a good snapshot of the overall health of your nervous system in whatever you've been putting it through. Yeah. And so, if you're wearing a wearable, and you wake up and you see your morning HRV score, let's say it's 40, right, and your baseline is 60, That's not a bad thing. Yes. It's a lower than your baseline, but that's not bad.

That's simply a language of your body saying whatever you did the day before is more of a load than your nervous system's been used to the last thirty days. The best thing you can do, listen to it. Honor it. Do something that nourishes your body, that gets you in a more parasympathetic state, versus what we're also conditioned to do in this modern society, push harder, work out harder, stay up late, doing the same thing that you're doing. Listening is the key to seeing over time the baseline maintain and go up.

Yeah. However, we know, it has been proven, as you age, your HIV is gonna decline because of all the stresses that you're putting it through. Right? So ideally, you wanna see your baseline maintain, and if possible, start to go up as you age, because in general, it will go down.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I noticed when I during COVID, I went to Maui, and I just stayed put and didn't travel and had a clear routine and went to bed the same time, woke up every day at the same time, and my HRV actually doubled.

Salim
And doubling at a lower level, that's massive. Right? Going from whatever it was, $16.20 to 40, is as good as going from, like, a 100 to two fifty. Right? It's not like that's how you need to think of it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But you said the score isn't the point. You say it's it's sort of like a different way of thinking about a biomarker, not like that it should be like this perfect number.

Salim
Totally. And that's what I find the biggest thing in clients and talking and seeing, is that there's this like score shame or judgment because you think you hear someone have a 100, a 170, you think you need to be there or you're not healthy, and that's not how it works. It really is a unique language and listening to your own body, because you notice better than anyone, the body is the temple. The body knows how to heal itself if you just give it the tools and technology and nutrition to do so. Right?

Mhmm. And HIV is just a compass guiding you to what is resonant with your body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Amazing. So so you work with clients, and you help them coach them on HRV, and we'll we'll put

Salim
a link into your your website. What's your website? That hrvguy.com.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That hrvguy.com. Okay. And you can learn more about Selene's work there. But what do you do with your clients to help them improve their stress resilience? Because it's not about the number, like you said.

It's just really about understanding how to work with stress in their nervous system so it's not so much of a chronic problem.

Salim
Totally.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what what do you do with your clients around Yeah.

Salim
So this is the question of, okay, how do you increase your HRV? What is what is what is the thing to do so? And to to to answer that question, I think I wanna just give a little background on, like, how I got to being so passionate about HRV. Right? So I grew up in Upstate New York, and I'm the oldest of three in a first generation Lebanese family, and I lost my father from cancer at a young age of seven, which very much was formative years.

Right? So that was shaping all of my programming and conditioning around how I go about, and it led to, you know, my caregiving, my belief I can't let people down, the sacrifice, which were all beautiful gifts that supported my journey. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
You're a people pleaser too.

Salim
Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's why we that's that's why we're such good friends, brother. And so I went to school for engineering, and I graduated, and I worked at a nuclear power plant that powered most of New York City. And it was during that

Dr. Mark Hyman
time Wait. Was that 3 Mile Island?

Salim
Indian Point. No.

Dr. Mark Hyman
3 Mile Island. Yeah.

Salim
Yeah. Indian Point.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I was like, oh, are you are you radioactive? No.

Salim
It was during that time that my grandmother, who was my second mom, got diagnosed with breast cancer, and I was like, what is going on in the world in this thing called cancer? And that's when I went down the rabbit hole of health. I started listening and learning about you and all these incredible people who were sharing a different perspective on health and nutrition, and it was the first time that I realized, wow, we see what people want us to see, and there's so much more out there. Right? So bring curiosity to it.

And so I started with diet, with food, with exercise. Right? And I I came across ketosis about eighteen years ago, and fell in love with the energy and the clarity from cutting out sugar. And so I would just drink water and unsweetened tea for, like, three, four years, and a colleague at the power plant of mine loved bubbles, and we drink our yerba mate every day together. And one day, we decided to brew the mate, cool it, put it in a soda stream, and we made the first unsweetened sparkling tea sound, my last company, which you know all about.

And so we quit the nuclear engineering job and went all in to launch a beverage. Rather challenging industry.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow. From nuclear power to a beverage company. Yeah.

Salim
Yeah. And it was at the time that the beverage company launched that the biohacking movement emerged, with the likes of Dave Asbury, Ben Greenfield, all these people. So my engineering mind went down every rabbit hole obsessed with biohacking, wanting to optimize to the point where I was showing off, I was hacking my way to five hours of sleep a night, running 10 miles every other day, listening to three audiobooks a week, raising money from a 170 people in New York City, thinking I'm winning this game of life. Right? I did that for five years until my body broke down and my knee gave out, and that was the beginning of my inward journey, and that's when I read doctor Joe Dispenza's book, Becoming Supernatural, and it was the first time in literature that I saw this biomarker, HIV, described relating to stress.

And the second I read that, the light bulb went off from my research around knowing what science has proven, that chronic stress is the number one lead cause of cellular inflammation, which is the root cause of aging, disease, and death. And so the past six years of my life have been a journey on understanding this biomarker HIV, and that led me to creating this framework that I call the art of the heart. And art stands for awareness, regulation, transformation. And this is a three act art that isn't a ladder you climb once, and you made it to the top, and you're regulated forever, and your nervous system's set, and you don't need to do anything.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's One and done?

Salim
One and done. No. That's not how real life works. Don't need to meditate again. Yeah.

Yeah. It's rather a daily act of devotion towards listening to your nervous system, towards utilizing HRV as a biomarker to support understanding what your body needs. So this is the framework that I bring to clients that I go talking about, and within this framework, there are five pathways Mhmm. To HRV growth to support nervous system sovereignty that I talk about. So the first pathway is sleep as the foundation, which I know you know all too well.

You talk about it on the podcast all the time, and has everything to do with actually what you shared in the beginning of the podcast, really honoring your circadian rhythm from a nervous system perspective standpoint. Right? And if you are jipping that deepest parasympathetic state, that delta state of sleep, it's gonna be very hard to see your HRV go up and to have sovereignty over your nervous system. So this kind of all relates to my story over the last six years, rewind to me showing off I was hacking my way to five hours of sleep was really not honoring my nervous system. It wasn't until I started honoring my sleep, revering my sleep, that I started seeing my HRV baseline, which when I started was 30, begin to go up step by step.

And so outside of honoring your circadian rhythm, so many other things I know you talk about in terms of blue light exposure and eating, you know, how long to eat before bed. So so many different tools that you can utilize to support your sleep. And if you weave the art framework, that awareness, regulation, transformation, to how you sleep, you could see what works for your body. So that's sleep the foundation. Second pathway is hormetic stress, the catalyst, and you talked about hormesis, and for those unfamiliar with it, hormetic stress is the philosophy of intentionally eliciting a stress on the body, and then consciously getting your body out of it.

Training. Right? The best analogy I give for that is weight training. When you go to the gym to lift your biceps, right, you're lifting more weight than the muscle can actually handle, tearing the fibers in your muscle bicep. What do you do the next day?

Right. Yeah. So that the following day, can go lift more weight. Yep. Same thing with your nervous system.

Put it in a conscious stressful state, contrast therapy, all these different things

Dr. Mark Hyman
Hot, cold. Hot, cold.

Salim
Then consciously get it out of it, and the thing is, most people don't complete the equation until you go to sleep. Right? And so back to my story, I decided to continue running the beverage company, putting myself in arguably one of the most challenging industries, continuing to raise money, but throughout the day multiple times, I would consciously drop my body into parasympathetic states using all of the biohacking technologies with the intention to bring a parasympathetic state to my body, whether it was contrast therapy, whether it was PMF, whether it was binaural beats, I mean, my house had all the gadgets you could imagine, so I was literally training to be an emotional athlete for about three years, and it was that training that took me from the baseline of 30 to above one seventy, because I literally was putting myself in arguably, for me, the most challenging stressful situation. So good news for anybody listening, I don't think any human being has a problem putting themselves in a stressful state. We do it all the time.

What I was the most guilty of, and most of us are, is not completing that equation and dropping into a parasympathetic side until we go to sleep. And this is where NSDR, non sleep deep rest, right, that we talk about in the biohacking field, it's so important to do it throughout the day.

Dr. Mark Hyman
To take a little break?

Salim
To take a little break, to take a pause, to do and it could be as simple as just two minutes of box breathing, or just a long slow exhale. Right? Or they know you know, the psychological side. Right? That resets the vagus nerve, calms the body.

Breath is the freest tool to support changing your internal state. So that's pathway number two, hormetic stress. Pathway number three, reframing the shift.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we go before the we sort of jump off the hormetic stress

Salim
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Kind of double down

Salim
on it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. Break down what what are the most effective tools in that framework.

Salim
Any anytime anyone asks me, like, what is the best thing? I always say, for me, because it's so unique to the individual, and that's where HRV is such a powerful compass for you to test what actually resonates with your body. Because cold plunging for me is great, but for some people, especially women, during certain ovulation cycles, it's not necessarily the best thing. So if you bring this art framework and awareness to whatever the thing is that you're doing, seeing if it regulates your body, seeing if your body's resonant for it, and then consistently showing up with that awareness and regulation, will lead to the transformation to support your HRV. And so it's listening, and in a day and age where we are so blessed to be inundated with so much technology, so much information, with AI helping, do this diet, do this exercise, right, it's all amazing.

But what works for me, or for a Brian Johnson, or for whoever, may have the opposite impact for someone else. So experiment yourself because your body is the guru. Your body knows what is most resonant with it. And if you were like me, I could not I was not attuned, I couldn't hear, I was too much up in here, and HRV supported getting me to listen to my It was a biomarker that was objectively telling me what is resonant with my body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Or, like, what are the most things affecting me? Like, is it a cold plunge? Is it a hot sauna?

Salim
For me, the number one tool that I know I've shared with you Right. I think you still do, NuCom, that app, it's a it's an app with a patented technology guaranteed to bet get your body in a parasympathetic state through binaural beats. So it essentially uses frequencies to guide your brain into a desired theta state. And for me, while I was running the beverage company, it was so hard for me in the middle of the day to sit and meditate. Right?

When you're in it, it is so challenging. But they have this twenty minute power nap that Tony Robbins says, the best power nap you could do. You listen to this track for twenty minutes, and your mind slowly goes from that high beta state through alpha into theta, and then gets you right back out of it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I've used I use it. It's fun. It's good. So so there's binaural beats, there's there's

Salim
Contrast therapy, there's breath work, meditation, dancing, swimming, running, whatever is resonant. So many different things out there that I know you talk about so many. There's so many technologies, and to use the technology like, I love all the biohacking technologies, but I was guilty the first five years of using it to do more and and and and have more energy instead of to bring internal stillness, calmness, parasympathetic side, to balance the equation.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We talk you talked about this idea of nervous system load, and your baseline, and the trends over time, and now there's all these tools to measure all the wearables and watches and rings. What what what should we be kinda looking at, and and what should be people paying attention to in tracking?

Salim
Great great question because we didn't talk about how to track it. And most people nowadays, like myself, through wearables, like Oura Ring, Whoop, Apple Watch. Right? The thing to know, all of these wearables different. They're all they're Like, if you do

Dr. Mark Hyman
if you measure multiple ones at the same time, you're gonna get different numbers on every one.

Salim
Totally. Because the Oura and the Whoop use RMSSID versus an Apple Watch, which uses something else that'll be slightly higher, versus athletes who use Polar H straps that give you actually, like, the real time. But no wearable gives you real time HRV. What you're getting in your morning score is actually your average nightly HRV reading. Right?

And what that's a good indicator of is the overall health and load you put your nervous system through the day before because it's being taken when there's no external simulation and you're lying down. Right? And so that's why listening to it and comparing it to your baseline is the best way to utilize these wearables, and to not wake up and say, oh, I have a low score, that's bad. Right? That is where then you stay perpetually in that low state because you are thinking it is bad.

It's not bad, it's your body saying, hey, Yesterday was more of a load than I'm used to. Why don't you nourish me a little more today?

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, you can you can use use any of these devices, and it's sort of an internally consistent metric. But if you jump between devices, you're gonna see different measurements.

Salim
You're gonna see so what I say, the best device to use is the one that you'll use consistently. Right? The one that's the most consistent that you could actually take day to day and understand what your baseline is.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Alright. I wanna go back to your your art framework and the five Pathways.

Salim
Right? So we talked about sleep It's awareness,

Dr. Mark Hyman
regulation, and transformation. Those are the three. Right?

Salim
Those are the three that you weave between each pathway. Right? And so pathway one, sleep, we said. Pathway two, hormetic stress. Pathway three, reframing the shift.

Right? And so if we go back to my story, I, for the next four years, continued running the beverage company, taking my HIV from thirty to a one seventy baseline, thinking I'm winning this game of life. Right? Good HIV score on the outside. The beverage company was doing great.

We were at a number two beverage in Whole Foods on the East Coast, opening up in 3,000 retailers. Outside, amazing. Internally, to keep up with that demand in the beverage space, you need a lot of capital. And I was struggling raising enough money to keep the beverage going, getting myself in a lot of debt and internal stress, and it was my birthday about three years ago, and in front of all of our community, I declared and asked, I wanted to step into less doing, more being. A common statement echoed amongst entrepreneurs approaching burnout.

And I got gifted from everybody, Ali, pulled together the community to give me a super 73 electronic bike, this Burning Man bike that I wanted so badly. And I take said bike for its first spin on the Venice Boardwalk, the sun is setting, and I'm like, oh, it's gonna work out, take a deep breath, the money's gonna come in, it always happens, and I get in the silliest accident that anteriorly dislocates my right shoulder, tears my labrum, and fractures thirty percent of my shoulder socket off. I had to go to the ER for them to dislocate to relocate it. I wake up the next morning still in pain, but more importantly, my mind's like, how can this happen now? How am I gonna raise Why?

Why? Why? Why? And my HRV, which at the time, baseline one seventy, dropped to 30. Yeah.

My body's screaming it was not happy. Right? Thankfully, I had a call with my coach that day, and I tell him the story, and he breaks out laughing. And I go, what the hell is so funny? And he goes, let's break down the body spiritually.

The arms represent the doing, the torso to body represents the being, the shoulder connects the doing to the being. What did you ask for on your birthday? Less doing, more being. What did you get? Exactly what you asked for from the gift in front of everybody that you asked for it.

How can you not laugh at the cosmic joke of what I call the educational simulation? And the second he said that, I broke out laughing, I was like, oh my god, my body is screaming for me to let go of this beverage because I had poured every ounce of my soul into it nine years, but I was running on the story of I can't let people down, I can't let my investors down, I can't let my family down, that I was not letting go of it. I had started talking about HRV, coaching HRV, but I blindfolded not letting go of this business, and I like, know what? Okay. I'm gonna listen, and I'm gonna let go of it.

And I shit you not, twenty four hours later, same dislocated shoulder, same pain, but my HRV tripled to 97, simply from changing my relationship to the injury happening for me. Yeah. That is the power of reframing in how much your relation

Dr. Mark Hyman
You always said to me, it didn't happen to you, it happened for you. I'm like, yeah, shut up. I did.

Salim
And I'm gonna keep saying that to you. Right? And so that's that's the importance of reframing in that pathway, which is is very underestimated, and it's it's the center. It's the center.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, that's goes to sort of a deeper a deeper framework of of understanding your life, which is often we fight against reality. And Byron Katie talks a lot about this, you know, arguing with reality, and and and the opposite of that is loving what is. And it's such a it's such a simple, obvious framework, but, you know, it's hard for us to do. It's really hard for us to go, not why is this happening to me, but why is this happening for me? And I I'm guilty of that like everybody else.

Me too. And and I'm like, oh god, you know, things are hard, like, this happened, or that happened, like, why? And and then they go, oh, this is actually in service of something that I can't quite see yet. It sounds kind of woo woo and and crazy, but I think the more I've lived, and I'm kinda old now, so I've had a few turns around the sun, it's truer every year. It's like when I can relax around what's happening and just trust in the unfolding, even if it's a difficult moment, and not fight it, but just feel it.

It it's a it's a huge life hack. You know? And it and it and it it doesn't mean you don't go through pain or suffering or discomfort. It just means your relationship to it is different.

Salim
And it's the relationship that matters, and that's why I intentionally call it an educational simulation for my mind to realize, especially when it's a more challenging thing, like, oh, yeah. What is the medicine in this for me to learn? I allow myself to to be in it, to grieve, to whatever, but then pull back and bring awareness, that art framework awareness to, wait. Why is this actually happening for me? That is where the importance of this art framework, especially in the reframing, to bring awareness to what is actually happening, and then learning to use different tools to support regulating what is going on in the internal state.

So that's reframing. Next path. So we have sleep as the foundation, hormetic stress reframing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump out of the the Reframe? The reframing. Yeah. I think this is really about perception. Right?

It's about how we interpret reality and how that affects our nervous system. Like I said, stress is the real or imagined touch of your body or ego. So it could be a real threat to your body or an imagined touch of ego that you're making up in your head that has nothing to do with what's actually happening. And so you talked about this idea of metacognition, about kind of awareness of your thought patterns, and how to re kind of look at your emotions from a different perspective. So, you know, I think it's important for people to understand this because it it it requires a bit of like, this witness consciousness they talked about in meditation where you're sitting.

Like, I've, you know, done ten day meditation retreats. And, you know, after a while, you're sitting there, and you're like, yeah. They're in my crazy mind going doing this thing. And so you have, like, the awareness of the awareness. Mhmm.

And it's like this meta framework of seeing yourself doing your thing, and it it kinda takes you out of identifying with the experience and being in it. It's more of the being of it, not in it. Yep. And that of not in is a really interesting framework. And this is kinda what you're talking about.

Right?

Salim
It's a thousand percent what I'm talking about, and metacognition now is proven to be the highest form of intelligence than intellect. Right? And metacognition meaning awareness of your thoughts, awareness of your internal state. Right? And by doing so, it totally changes the dynamic of your nervous system.

Just looking at it from a nervous system perspective, because all a nervous system ever wants, safety. Right? You talked about how we don't need to turn on the sympathetic state, it automatically happens, because it's programmed in us for thousands of years to automatically if we see a tiger, oh, fired at. Right? We know that.

Right? So it's a pattern that's there, and it's an on off switch. Right? I liken the nervous system. I have an analogy to hospitals in Florida.

They have this fail safe button where if a tornado or hurricane is coming, right, metal shades and and come down to protect everybody from getting hurt. Brilliant program put in place to save people. What happens if a shooter's in the building and someone hits that button? Not so brilliant of a program, but it was birthed from a brilliant place. That's how our nervous systems want.

When that amygdala fires off, no on off switch, no access to the prefrontal cortex, to all of our knowledge, our intuition, everything we know, we go back here. So the more we can bring metacognition and awareness and be like, oh, actually, I am spinning over this email. I'm okay, physically. I'm I'm totally fine. Let me take a breath.

Let me go respond to the email, but let me respond to it from this place versus the limbic automatic replace place that we're so used to firing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's helpful it's helpful, and it's it's it takes a a practice. Like, I think to be aware of your mind and not identify it with your mind is a tough thing. You know, Viktor Frankl, in Mansurfschehr meeting, talked about this simple idea where he he didn't let his Nazi chapters in Auschwitz control his thinking in his mind. And he's like, you know, he says in between stimulus and response, there's a pause, and in that pause lies a choice, and in that choice lies your freedom. Yep.

And what he means is, like, you you have a pause. Yeah. And that pause doesn't happen for most of us. It it's it can be a millisecond Mhmm. Between stimulus and response.

Mhmm. But what you're talking about is trying to figure out how to sort of exercise the muscle allows you to create more than a millisecond. Allows you to create a pause between your stimulus and your response. And the stimulus is the stimulus. That's just gonna be what it But how you respond to

Salim
it The only

Dr. Mark Hyman
thing that you do react to it Yep. Is a very different framework.

Salim
And that's likened to the space between each heartbeat, which is your HRV. Right? And and for me, the the biggest practice that has supported my journey that I work with clients, I know I've worked with you on, is a morning practice to get you to remember that, right, to tether to that. Because I had a mentor who wants to say so beautifully, as humans, we all came here to remember and forget. Remember and forget.

Remember and forget. The mastery comes from shortening the gap between remembering and forgetting. Right? So the more consistent you do that, the more consistent you remind yourself that, oh, yeah. It's happening for me.

Let me ground into that. Let me go out in the world. I'm gonna forget. That's what we're here for, to forget. But let me shorten that gap between forgetting and remembering.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's the third thing. Yep. The fourth the fourth Fourth pathway is Pathway is

Salim
intentionality, the alignment. Right? And so, back to my story, I said, okay, I'm gonna let go of this beverage, but I wanted to see if there's a way I could I could still salvage it for myself and the investors. And it took about six months, but we ended up finding a holding company that acquires distressed beverages. We put an APA, an asset purchase agreement together.

So they purchased our brand and asset. They took our cap table and our 170 investors who own some of the new company. They took the debt to continue from the suppliers to continue producing, but the rest of the debt fell on the company's shoulder, which we dissolved and literally fell on my shoulder, so I had to go through personal bankruptcy. Mhmm. Right?

Which was the last attachment of my beautiful mind and ego to its identity. And so I did what most people do But you're

Dr. Mark Hyman
gonna be a multi billionaire founder of a beverage. Right?

Salim
Oh, that that's what I had my mindset on. Yeah. Then and then all of that goes away. And so I I go to Bali to eat, pray, love, and find myself. Right?

Yeah. And every morning in Bali, I contemplate my beautiful wish, less doing, more being. And every morning, my beautiful incessant mind would come on and say, but we love doing, we're so good at doing, what are we gonna do if we're not doing? Until one morning, I have an epiphany. That statement, less doing and more being, is mind made and dualistic in nature, and it implies that doing and being are mutually exclusive.

Mhmm. When the reality is, we're always being, even though we're unaware of it 99% of the time, and we're always doing, even if we're sitting, or sleeping, or breathing. So it's actually not about doing less and being more, it's about the intentionality in your doing, the why behind your doing

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the how you're

Salim
and the how you're doing it. And and the reason it came to me was I was reading the Bhagavad Gita, and one of my favorite quotes from the Bhagavad Gita is, you have a right to your actions, but never your actions' fruit. Act solely for the action's sake, and don't be attached to inaction. Meaning, we all came here with a right to act, to create, to do. We don't have a right to the outcome of our doing, and we must solely act for our intention, for our why.

And what I've come to find with HRV is it is a compass telling you how aligned you are with your body and your highest self and your ultimate purpose. And a compass needs three points to triangulate. So for HRV, point one is what you're perceiving. Point two is how you're reacting, how you're responding to what you're perceiving. And point three is something to compare it to, your why.

And most people, I was so guilty of running on an old why, I can't let people down, I need to sacrifice, I need to support, and I wasn't auditing what was actually resonant with my body in that time. And so, to intentionally take the time, which I do in my morning practice, to audit your why, to ground into your purpose, and then go about doing actions that align with that, your HRV will go up because your nervous system is resonant with the actions that you're taking in life. So that's the important of intentionality in your path toward the HRV.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What we're really talking about is integrity, like integrity with yourself. With yourself,

Salim
with your word, with your body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And alignment is is sort of

Salim
how you get into integrity. 1000%.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And most of us are somehow living in in a world where we're doing things for others.

Salim
Well, we're we're listening to our we're up here. We're in our story. We're in our ego, which again was birthed from a a a brilliant place and needed. Right? I needed my ego to think I needed to support, I needed to sacrifice, so I could build everything I built and be on this journey.

Right? Your biggest wound is your greatest gift, always, always. Mhmm. Mhmm. It's just not a lot it's it's about not allowing it to be in the driver's seat 99% of the time, bringing awareness and sovereignty, being like, actually, this is good here, but I'm gonna laugh at you the other 99% because it's not needed anymore.

Okay. The fifth The fifth one. You're gonna love this one. Community, the amplifier. And I know this comes as no surprise, especially to you, every blue zone in the world, a pillar is community.

The longest study in human history, the eighty year Harvard study, right, that followed 72 youth from Boston, age 18, in every aspect of their lives, from medical records to interviews with spouses, colleagues, children, to find out what led to a longer, healthier, happier life. Mhmm. Right? And after eighty years, three generations of scientists, all this research, they came back with one thing, and that was relationships.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Community.

Salim
And not quantity, but quality. And from a nervous system perspective, that has everything again to do with all the nervous system wants is safety. Mhmm. And one of the best ways that we feel most safe is being authentically seen by a mirror, by another human. Right?

Not needing to wear a mask, just being our most authentic self and resonating with other people who are on that similar frequency. So community is the amplifier.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's huge, but here's a question, Salim. You know, it's easy to say that, and I obviously say it a lot. And community is medicine. Yeah. It's as powerful as food is medicine.

Yep. But creating it and having it is not as easy as saying it. Yeah. I mean, it's easier to change your diet than to instantly create a community that you belong to and to create a sense of belonging and connection.

Salim
And this is such a good question, this every time I get asked this question, go back. My sister, shout out to her, she's a big fan of you, a functional medicine doctor, Christine, and she reached out to me when I moved to LA because I had somehow just got this beautiful community all around. She's like, Salim, I miss you, you're not here, like, I I'm so desperately seeking community, like, what do I need to do, like, how come? And I responded saying, this didn't just happen overnight. And the reality is, again, I believe this is an educational simulation, and I believe in quantum science and physics have proven what we are perceiving, we are creating, right, via the double slit experiment and the observer effect.

Right? Like, we are turning the electrons from a wave into a particle with our perception. Mhmm. Right? And so, essentially, everything is a mirror, and if you want community, you need to first and foremost cultivate whatever you're seeking internally.

Right? That is that is the most important thing. So whatever if you're saying, I'm seeking community first, and I had a a mentor tell me this, when I went to him asking Erwin, he was like, well, what is it that you seek in a community? What do you want? Have you ever thought about that?

So I journaled about it, and then I would spend time intentionally getting myself into that frequency, into that state, and then I end up materializing beautiful humans like you in my life.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow. That's a that's a little big, Salim. I love it.

Salim
Essentially You

Dr. Mark Hyman
sterilize me. Okay.

Salim
Be be the thing that you want in a community, and then you end up putting out this vibration of other people who are matching that resonance.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? Rather than come from a needy place, nourish yourself

Salim
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Cultivate your own inner well-being Yeah. And that will naturally attract people.

Salim
In the time, if you are authentically doing that. So the first step that I give to someone who asks this question is actually write down what do you want in a community. Because most of you are like, oh, I see Mark with this bread of a computer. Like, I want that. What is it that you actually want?

Right? Journal about that. That would be my step one.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and you have to be deliberate about it. You know? We we invest so much time in all sorts of things, work and emails and whatever, But, you know, it it takes a a conscious, deliberate, consistent set of react responses to your life to actually cultivate and develop friends and community. And it to me, it's as I get older, it is the most important thing in my life. You know?

And everything else just sort of like whatever. And I think this is such a it's such a key framework. So we've got we've got sleep. Yep. Right?

The foundation. Hormetic stress, like saunas called plunges, stress training Yep. Reframing the shift. So looking at your your thoughts and being aware to of

Salim
your stories. Yep.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Being in integrity with your purpose and alignment with who you are and not living somebody else's life. Yeah. And then building community, which helps sort of cultivate all the response. So this is a good road map. I I love these five pathways.

They're they're great. On a day to day basis, when you're coaching someone, like, what are you doing with them? Like, how do you kinda help them go through and because the point isn't to, like, get your HRV number better. It's to help your nervous system become, as you say, sovereign. How how do you coach people to do that?

Salim
So it's essentially weaving that art framework, awareness, regulation, and transformation, into each of these pathways in their unique way. So it's first getting a baseline of kind of where they're at and what the stresses in their life are, and really changing their relationship to understand, you know, we talked about I I mentioned the educational simulation. Right? Mhmm. And and so I wanna just break down what is happening in your body when you perceive a stress or a threat.

Right? Yeah. And the reality is when you when we're we when we see a stress or a trigger, beneath what we are perceiving, what we are seeing, there's always an emotion or multiple emotions associated with this challenge. Right? Yeah.

And directly connected to that emotion is a physical sensation that's stuck in the body. And if you peel the onion one layer deeper, an emotion, as we talked about on a quantum level, is just a scalar wave of energy. It's frequency. There is no such thing as a good or bad emotion, and as humans, we're actually meant to feel every emotion on the spectrum. Grief, anger, love, joy, feel it, for they say about ninety seconds until the wave moves through us.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Instead of staying stuck in it.

Salim
Instead of staying stuck in it. However, most of us, and especially in that formative years, when the baseline brainwave state is theta, and we don't know how to process the emotion, and we don't have a prefrontal cortex to discern it ourselves, that scalar wave of frequency that's supposed to move through us freezes, and I like to think of it forming a glacier in the fascia in our body. Right? And so all the emotion wants is to be felt, but now we have a whole story around it, you know? You you mentioned zebras, there's this analogy I gave, there's a YouTube video of a deer eating grass on the side of a road and getting clipped.

Right? And the the video stays on the deer, and for about a minute, it looks like it's dead. Then all of a sudden, it gets up, and it does this kind of, like, tremor thing, and you think it would run for its life. Instead, it goes right back to eating grass like nothing ever happened. Why?

Because that tremor was it moving that stuck frozen emotion out, and then there's no more story, and they just get to be in the present moment, and they're eating grass like nothing happened. But we as humans, we love story. So this frozen glacier that's in our fascia, we create a whole world around it that we project on our friends, on our relationships, on our business, and all it wants is to be felt. Right? And so, you know, the number one fear in humans documented stage fright, public speaking.

Right? It was a big, big fear of mine, and I used to get on stage or do podcasts, and I get this knot in my stomach, and I used to think the knot came because I'm on a stage. The reality is that I co created this stage, this experience, and this podcast to feel what I am calling an uncomfortable knot that really is just a stuck frozen emotion about my self worth, or whatever the story So if you can feel, and you said that earlier, if you can feel into your body, that is what gets the emotion to move. But it is very challenging to feel when you are triggered in a stressful state, right? That on off switch.

So what I work on is learning to train to be an emotional athlete and feel these stuck frozen emotions Mhmm. Before it actually happens in real life. Mhmm. And that looks like, essentially, in whatever practice you do sitting, and intentionally, with your mind, eliciting the stress or the trigger or whatever it is story you're stuck in, and as soon as you feel that emotion, that stuck frozen glacier elicited, you drop out of the story, you drop out of the visual, you drop out of your mind, and you drop into a somatic awareness practice where you are just physically describing the sensations in your body. And by putting your attention on the sensation without the story, you're giving this emotion all it wants.

All it wants is to be felt, and not judged, put in this box. And if you do that over time, the glacier melts, and then when the thing happens in real life, the on off switch isn't as strong, and you have access to your prefrontal cortex. And this is That's

Dr. Mark Hyman
the grown up in

Salim
the room. That's the grown up in the room, not the little child in the room. And this is why athletes, you know, I got approached by a sports agency, because they're like, our hall of fame best athletes, they all have much higher HRVs than regular athletes. Like, why would that be the thing? And I was like, oh, that makes so much sense physiologically.

Michael Jordan, when he used to approach a game seven free throw, right, he wasn't there thinking what everybody outside is looking at, like, my god, this is such a high stakes stress reliever. He was like, this is just another free throw. I'm cool and calm, which means he was using his prefrontal cortex, his amygdala wasn't firing off, so he had access to all of his muscle memory, because your muscle memory is in the prefrontal cortex, of the thousands of free throws he took, versus another athlete who isn't as cool and calm as Michael Jordan approaches that same thing, his amygdala fires, he's back here. Guess what? He could have taken more free throws than Michael Jordan, but he doesn't have access to that muscle memory.

So your agility to shift states, your sovereignty over your internal state is so important to how you go about responding to the external world.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A lot of us just kinda push through it. Right? We don't we don't really stop to reset our system. We just kinda and I I'm guilty of this. You know, just kind of go go go go go I'm guilty of it.

And override my body's sensations, override my body's signals, don't listen to the feeling. And how do you help people sort of unlearn that habit? Asking for a friend.

Salim
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I and and and Mark, the reason why I talk about this and I work on this, it's funny, I think the thing, and I've told you this, the thing that we do and we're most passionate about is the thing we need the So I need nervous system sovereignty more than anybody else, hence why I'm so passionate about it.

And it is really just discipline and showing up with compassion for yourself when that happens. Because again, people are like, I can't believe I said that again. I can't believe I did that again, when they react automatically in situations. You need to have compassion because that's just the little kid in you running their old program. So if you can train outside of the stressful situation to learn to feel that stuck emotion, you will have more sovereignty as the next time that it happens.

Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So it's really about it's about developing, like, training. Like, if you wanna lift weights, I mean, I you know, you you can't start with, like, 50 push ups. You have to do five. Right?

And and so it's really about the training that you're talking about, the daily training. And I and I've been doing this every morning. I do breath work. I do meditation. I do some qigong practices, and it really helps me to kinda ground my nervous system every day and easily come back to that throughout the day.

You were gonna teach me some Tibetan breath thing. I wanna I learned that too, but, like, I think I think there's all sorts of tools and techniques and practices out there, but it's important that people take this seriously because if you don't learn how to actively relax, it sounds almost like a kind of oxymoron, like to actively do nothing. But it it's really hard to to activate your parasympathetic system unless you're really deliberate about it. So I I think different people can be attracted to different practices, but it is it is something you have to be deliberate about, whether it's breath work, whether it's yoga, whether it's meditation, whether it's qigong, whether it's simple box breathing.

Salim
Washing. This is what whatever. And that's where the art framework, bringing awareness to what works and resonates with you to get your body in that parasympathetic activation. Right? And so there's not one right thing, and and I am not here saying do the I'm saying just listen to your body and what's resonant with it.

And HRV for me has been an objective biomarker that is telling you what is resonant and supporting guiding you to flex that muscle.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you'll say, know, maybe you do the same thing, but how you feel inside is different. Right? So they they say, you know, in the Zen Buddhist say, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

Salim
It's just your relationship to it is totally different. It's totally, totally different.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So yeah. Amazing. So, Celine, thank you for diving into this whole field and getting it out there. I think it's important people understand this because people here stress, they don't really have a a framework for understanding what to do or how to navigate it and how to track it. I think people can go to that hrbguy.com.

Learn more about you, your work, your coaching platform, and get help if they need it. Find you on Instagram, and what is your

Salim
Same thing. That HRV guy, thanks to Allie. T h a t h r v guy. Yeah. And you can find all all social, everything through that.

And the one thing I guess I'd leave the audience

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like the cable guy.

Salim
Like that HRV guy. The HRV guy. Yeah. The one thing I think my favorite, you know, philosophy that a that a mentor teacher taught me that really supported, you know, that reframing pathway and just cultivating a different relationship with life, so intentional with your words and your thoughts, right, because that's what creates your reality. And instead of saying, I have a good HRV score or a bad HRV score, this person's good or bad, or right or wrong, or blue versus red, I use dissonant or resonant.

Right? Because everything's just frequency. And if something is dissonant for me, it could be resonant for you. And if something's dissonant for me today, tomorrow I could wake up, and it's actually resonant. But by not labeling it bad today, tomorrow my nervous system won't lock up, because I didn't label it bad, I labeled it dissonant, and it is open and more malleable to being, seeing how I feel in that moment.

Right? So anytime I catch myself or someone saying, oh, that was good, that was was like, dissonant or resonant. Beautiful.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Beautiful. Well, you, Salim. Thanks for your your creativity around helping people frame this differently and think about it. Thanks for your work and ready to check out your stuff and thanks for being on the podcast.

Salim
Man, thank you for having me and thank you for all you've done in this world. Such an inspiration. I love you, Mark.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.