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

1. Dr. Andy Galpin

   The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life.

2. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. And today we're going to be talking about how to control your nervous system.

3. My favorite example of this actually comes from a TV show. Many of you probably remember the show The Office, at least the American version. And I'll never forget one of the classic scenes, one of the characters, Dwight Schrute, was telling and bragging actually about how he had superior genes, and he was able to, at his own will, raise his blood cholesterol levels.

4. And of course, the bewildered friends of his asked him, why would you even want to do that? And his response in classic Dwight fashion was, so that he could lower his cholesterol. That had made me laugh, and I've never stopped laughing at that. And it highlights one example, albeit, admittedly, not sure why you would want to do that, or if that's real or not. But it highlights the point of, how can we actually have control over aspects of our physiology that most people think we can't?

5. Maybe we have some control, but it's subconscious or otherwise. And that's what I'm referring to when I say control your nervous system. There is actually a bunch of science behind this. Probably the most famous initial scientifically documented experiment came in 1970. There was a famous gentleman, I think his name is Swami Rama. I hope I pronounced that appropriately. But Swami was able to do a host of feats that still baffle most of us.

6. What eventually happened was he sat in a room with a handful of scientists, and they placed what are called ECGs to measure electrical conductivity of his heart, as well as EEGs to measure directly into his brain. And he performed again this whole host of insane physiological feats without moving. Now that part's critical, right?

7. So when he did things like take his resting heart rate from 70 beats per minute to reportedly 300 beats per minute, and he held that for several seconds and then brought it back down, he did that not by running sprints up a hill or anything, but by just simply sitting there and having the conscious ability to control that aspect of his physiology.

8. Another really impressive thing Swami was able to do was actually shock the scientific team. They thought he was in cardiac arrest because his ECG stopped working. And what happened was he was able to bring his heart rate below 20 beats per minute at the same time, give himself what's called AFib. And so the machine itself thought his heart had been stopped for like 20 seconds. I guess he signaled that, you know, I'm fine, I'm OK here. And then eventually brought it back up.

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