I've known about your work for a very long time admired it for a very long time and one of the things that um excited me about being able to sit down with you today is that uh our Laboratories studied breath work your laboratory studying breath work and um and I know that you've been doing a study on the so-called Wim Hof method um which of I'll let you familiarize our listeners to some of them are familiar with the Wim Hof method others are not I think a lot of people think of a whim in terms
of his role as the Iceman because of cold exposure but of course he has um breath work practices that mirror um things like tumor breathing and other things but maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you're doing there and what you're interested in discovering I realize it's too early to give us the results but hopefully they'll come back and do that at another time but what is the study what motivated the study and maybe I can convince you to give us a little teaser of what you're discovering so for um I I
for many years I mean I think my um first paper when I was a graduate student with Boost McEwen was about this idea of positive physiological stress and so I've always been wanting to really understand what's positive stress how can we induce it and instead for many many too many years I've been studying the dark side toxic stress trauma caregiving and how that is can take a toll on the body without the right resilience and resources and now I'm very excited about the uh the opportunity to just focus on different ways that we can stress
out our body and mind in short-term bursts that might promote stress resilience and the body-based strategies are concrete they're quick they're um they're also my favorite strategies I I probably have internalized a lot of the mindsets and the you know the things that I've learned from meditation and what I feel the biggest bang for the buck is you know if I'm waking up like super jittery with a big stress response because of X or Y it is actually something like um a you know uh a hit type workout or taking the dogs for like a
really brisk walk or like burning up that energy and my body is um a very big effect size for me personally everyone has their you know different ways that they can see the biggest shifts in Daily stress so I've been looking for ways to create positive stress besides exercise we all know about exercise and I met Wim Hof at a uh a meeting where we talked kind of back to back and so we hadn't I had kind of heard something about you know crazy Iceman climbing up the Himalayas I really had yes 27 or more
World Records yeah for that sort of thing yeah so he so I got to hear I got to do the breathing with him during this conference and I just felt like Elation afterwards I was like what was that and then he heard about telomeres and he was like I need to know if my method is affecting cell aging he loves research and so we he helped us design a study that we've been working on at UCS staff um with my colleagues Wendy Mendez and Eric pray there it's been many years and it's funded by the
John W brick Foundation which is very focused on what are non-dragway ways that we can help mental health so it was a very good fit for all of us to come together and design the study and we have been basically comparing low arousal relaxation methods mindfulness slow breathing to positive stress exercise and Wim Hof method and one of the things that we've learned in a big way is that regardless of whether we're creating deep states of ease or hermetic stress in the body that short-term burst of either aerobic activity or the extreme breathing people feel
better period so three weeks later after this experiment of doing their practice every day they were either randomly assigned to the high arousal or the low arousal the level of stress anxiety and depression fell dramatically in everyone so many paths to changes in stress there are probably very different physiological Pathways and and we can talk about that more when we get to really look in depth at our physiological data as well as our blood-based data but what we do know is that the Wim Hof method did create daily positive emotion that increased over time just
like your study on sighing and so even though there are different mechanisms they were selectively boosting feelings of positivity I love that you know that's very unusual to get a very selective positive effect super interesting I can't wait to hear more about the data so I gather and by the way no is a perfectly fine answer I gather that you're not going to tell us about the whether or not there are telomere changes yet or maybe that's not possible um to detect in this kind of short-term study so what we're going to look at we
don't really think that telomeres can change very quickly and telomerase May so we're going to look at mitochondrial enzymes telomerase and gene expression patterns and as you know we can look at many different mechanisms and Pathways with gene expression patterns especially with these new kind of essays where you can look at you know seven thousand different proteins like the Soma logic and so we'll get to see well what's the pat you know did we really change patterns of acute stress with these different types of stress resilience interventions and in terms of the physiological reactivity there
are ways that we can examine both the stress response system sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic response system and I will tell you that um while we're still preparing the results there were very different profiles from the different interventions that make us think that there's a lot of specificity even though everyone feels better the the way that they got there is very different in ways that we're impacting both the nervous system and the Brain foreign [Music]
