45: Dr. Dave Rabin Explains the Science of Stress and Recovery

Dr Dave Rabin: I mean, stress is the number one killer. And I think it's important to note also that stress isn't always bad. We, you know, there's different kinds of stress, right? Inflammation is an important term because inflammation is how our cells actually communicate with one another. So a little bit of inflammation here and there is not bad.

Michael Kummer: What popped into my head was cold exposure. But what you just said is, you know, if I go into this plunge knowing that this is not a life threatening situation, maybe I have a coach, you know, with me that says, Hey.

Dr Dave Rabin: Everything that goes on around us, everything that happens in the world is related to vibration and frequency.

Michael Kummer: And my wife has become the greatest fan. And it works, as you said, you know, in near real time and within minutes. No matter what state of mind I am, I put on Apollo and I feel a significant difference. So the primal shift podcast, I'm your host, Michael Kummer, and my goal is to help you achieve optimal health by bridging the gap between ancestral living and the demands of modern society.

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All right, Dr. Rabin, so much for joining me on the podcast today. Uh, I know that you're not feeling great, so I appreciate it even more that you're making the time to set the stage kind of, I've been trying to optimize my health and do a lot of things.

Uh, but one of the most challenging things for me, and I think that applies to many people is managing stress and improving one's, uh, stress resilience. Diet is relatively, I mean, everything is complex and can be difficult, but diet is relatively easy. sleep is relatively easy, exercise is super easy, I want to say, but dealing with stress, avoiding stressors and learning how to deal with them or mitigating their impact.

That's something that has been, kept me on my toes. And I know that's affects many people. And I just told you before we started the show, I actually had a cold myself. Uh, the first in a very long time. And I told my wife 100 percent self inflicted because I'm I overdid it with stress. I put too much on my plate.

I borderline it for too many days, weakening my immune system. And then my son got sick and you know, a couple of days after I had it as well. Whereas in the past I would have just, you know, my immunity would have dealt with it. How do you feel about that? How important do you think stress is for you and what you see in your environment with the people you work with?

Dr Dave Rabin: Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I mean, stress is the number one killer, right? It's, it shuts down, you know, our entire body's ability to recover because when we're under stress and it's constant stress every day, that is, we're not adapting too well and we don't have the time to cope with. Well, it stores up in our bodies and it basically tricks our bodies into thinking that we're in a fight or flight response all the time.

And so the modern neuroscience, which is actually really fascinating, is showing that, you know, this is really a resource allocation problem. So when we are under stress and fight or flight, if you, if we understand the neural neurobiological history of how we evolved as human beings, what we understand is that when we are under this intense chronic stress, and we're in fight or flight mode all the time, our bodies take all of our available blood and resources and send it to our fight or flight systems, which are the heart, lungs, skeletal muscles, motor cortex of the brain, the fear center of the brain.

And that is to get away from threat, to get away from a predator. It's the exact same response. And the problem is that that blood and all those blood and resources has to come from somewhere because we only have so much to go around. So where does it come from? It comes from our immune system, it comes from our digestive system, our reproductive system, our empathy and creativity systems, our sleep and rest and recovery systems, our, and so all of those systems start to get resource depleted and start to over time dysfunction, which is why we get sick when we're stressed out.

Michael Kummer: Right. And would you say that I mean, the immune system is, you know, obviously not just there to prevent us from getting sick, but it plays a major role in the inflammatory response as well, right? So, if you think about the development of metabolic disease, of cardiovascular disease, of, you know, Alzheimer's, cancer, what have you, in all that, the immune system, or at least our inflammatory response, is somewhat involved, right?

And so, everything else being equal, if we have a poorly functioning immune system, I guess we increase our risk of death. Developing those diseases that the body might be able to fight if it had sufficient resources. Is that a fair statement?

Dr Dave Rabin: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's important to note also that stress isn't always bad.

We, you know, there's different kinds of stress, right? There's stress in a safe environment, which we call EU stress, EU stress, which is stress that challenges us to grow and become better, stronger versions of ourselves. But we know we're not under threat when we're facing that stress. So it's stress in a safe context.

And then there's stress. where we're not sure the context is safe, and that's what we call distress. And that can come from too much incoming information, too many responsibilities, too much uncertainty, too much news, right? All of these things start to over stimulate our bodies and our minds. And if we are not highly trained in the techniques you mentioned earlier, like the exercise and the meditation and the mindfulness and the yoga and the breathing, which are all theoretically easy, right?

Then we end up succumbing to stress. And the, the pair, the problem here, which is a little bit of a paradox is that stress itself, chronic stress and distress makes it harder for us to engage in those techniques, those healthy, natural health. techniques because stress makes us cling to what's familiar and it causes tunnel vision.

That's one of the most common things that we see when people are in fight or flight state is that they don't see the whole picture. They only see what's relevant to me right now to get out of what I perceive to be a threatening situation. And so We're missing a lot of the rest of the opportunities and the decisions that we could make when we're thinking about the world from an enclosed like tunnel vision stress state.

And so it impacts everything from the way that our, our bodies function on an inflammatory and immune level, all the way through the way that we make decisions on a day to day basis and how much sleep we get and stuff that really impacts our lives. And so when we have You know, inflammation is an important term because inflammation is how our cells actually communicate with one another.

So a little bit of inflammation here and there is not bad, but when you have constant chronic inflammation across the board, that's when we start to see people succumbing to illness.

Michael Kummer: So what would be a good example of eustress? Yeah,

Dr Dave Rabin: so eustress would be For instance, you know, teaching a child to read, right?

It might be frustrating at first because, you know, it's hard for, for the child to start to understand the meaning of the letters and how to put words together. And it can be frustrating and challenging, but there's no actual threat. You have a parent or a trusted person around, you know, helping them to understand how to do it.

And when they do it, they come out on the other side, even though it's hard knowing how to read. Right. So that's like a very simple idea. Um,

Michael Kummer: is it a, use stress for the child or for the parents? I

Dr Dave Rabin: mean, it could be for both, but I think that it, you know, it might not be as stressful for the adult. The adults might enjoy it, but for the child, um, it's, it's a use stress because it's challenging them to do something new.

That's hard. Right. That is, but it's in the context of safety. So another example would be of a eustress is with a child or an adult where they have something challenging that happened to them and it's not life threatening. It's just that they had a hard day or something happened that didn't go their way.

And then they come to us and we say, okay, I'm so, you know, I'm so sorry to hear that happened to you. Um, why don't we take a couple of deep breaths? And so walking through that process of saying, okay, I know I'm not feeling good. I'm feeling all these unpleasant, restless feelings in my body. My thoughts are moving really fast.

My heart rate's high. I'm just going to take a slow, nice deep breath in for five seconds and then exhale for five seconds. And so. That is a very, very simple and thousands of year old technique for humans to regain control of a situation that feels like distress, because there's all this chaos going on in our bodies and minds, but then through the application of a breath technique with a safe, another safe human being that we feel comfortable around, we can actually transform distress which feels like, Oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed.

Like I'm going to, I don't know how I can go on. This is just too much to, okay, let's, I know that this is really, really hard, but maybe I'm facing this challenge right now because it's an opportunity for me to grow and become a stronger human being and learn how to tolerate distress and learn how to tolerate discomfort so that I can become better at tolerating distress and discomfort.

Does that make sense?

Michael Kummer: Yeah, no, it absolutely doesn't. And while you were saying this, I was, what popped into my head was cold exposure. You know, because for a while, you know, it was like the thing, you know, like ice, you know, ice bathing, et cetera. I have several cold plunges. I love cold plunging. But now lately, it's more like, well, you know, maybe it's not that good because it's, you know, you basically put your body in a position where it thinks, you know, you're on the sinking Titanic and you're about to freeze in ice cold water.

But what you just said is, you know, if I go into this plunge knowing that this is not a life threatening situation, maybe I have a coach, you know, with me that says, Hey, It's going to be super uncomfortable, you know, let's breathe through it. Let's, you know, and you turn this into something where, yes, it's absolutely unpleasant.

but you don't feel any more like you're out of control and you can remain in control. It can very much be a positive stressor. Would you agree with that?

Dr Dave Rabin: Yeah, absolutely. That's actually one of the most common physical versions of, of you stress that we describe is like hot sauna, cold plunge because you're putting the body into these intense extremes of extreme heat and then extreme cold.

And it is, it can certainly be uncomfortable at first, But you're not gonna die and no, no harm is gonna come to you as long as you're doing it properly and you're not You know staying in any one setting too long And so that trains our body to tolerate discomfort which makes us more resilient as human beings,

Michael Kummer: right?

Okay, and now that makes that makes a lot of sense. Um now, what would you say though? Is there such a thing of exposing yourself to too much eustress if you're already redlining as far as your de stress is concerned? So in other words, should I avoid the sauna or the cold plunge or both on days where I already feel like I'm tapped out?

Dr Dave Rabin: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great point. And, you know, I think that's actually where these understanding are, you know, listening to our bodies, tapping into our bodies and how rested and recovered we feel. And also, you know, biometrics like heart rate variability become really interesting, which is a measure of our, it's one of the best measures of our recovery and how recovered we are and resilient we are over time.

And you can, that's why most wearables track it now. And. It's also become a measure of resilience, so looking at something like heart rate variability across weeks or days, or weeks or months, you can start to see, hey, you know, I woke up today and I'm feeling like, okay, maybe I didn't get as much sleep last night as I thought, maybe I'm not feeling as rested as I thought, let's check my HRV.

So you check your HRV says you're like in the, you're 20 percent lower than you normally are, right? You're 50 percent lower than you normally are. And that is further confirmation that we're not recovered and that, and we're not fully resilient. So that if we go put ourselves into a stressful situation, even if it is normally thought about as you stress, Our bodies can misinterpret it as distress because we are already in a decompensated state and we see this with women in hot cold points.

This is actually one of the most common mistakes that women make, not of their own fault, but because nobody tells them, which is that in the luteal phase of your menstrual cycle, it is not the opportune time to do hot and cold because extremes, because the body is under a lot of stress and strain. And so women who do cold plunge and and sauna during that time, even just cold plunge alone, can increase their rate of illness because their immune system is already slightly off and their bodies are not necessarily functioning in the way that they are the rest of the month in terms of the high level of resilient functioning.

And so. That's a time period where we tell women, especially if they're pre menstrual, they're, you know, not in menopause, they're still menstruating monthly, that this is not the time to do your hot cold plunge or push yourself and do your stress extremes. This is a time to take it a little bit easier and recover.

Michael Kummer: Yeah, no, we have two cold plunges and one I actually turned to 55 degrees because, you know, I've been trying to get my, well, mine is set to 39, 37, um, as cold as it gets, but It's also one thing that, you know, women, again, depending on, you know, when they are in the cycle, you know, what their hormonal, you know, status is, et cetera, or health, you know, it might not be conducive to expose themselves to the same type of stressors, just from an, I guess, evolutionary perspective, you know, I mean, we are the hunter gatherers, we are the ones, you know, fighting with the saber toothed tiger, not necessarily, women wouldn't be in the front line, you know, I guess.

Uh, even though, you know, with all, you know, everyone's being equal and stuff, but, you know, there are still physiological differences that you have to take into account and you have to listen to your body and, you know, if, if sitting in, in, in literally freezing water, you know, it's not going to do well for you, then, well, don't do it, you know, and maybe increase the temperature a little bit and, and see where it's uncomfortable.

But you still, you know, doable.

Dr Dave Rabin: Yeah, absolutely. And this is part of why we actually developed the Apollo technology was because we wanted to, people, most people don't have an understanding of all the stuff that we're talking about, right? We have not, again, no fault of ours. Like we were just never taught this stuff.

I was never taught this stuff growing up. It took many decades to figure it out. And. Even with all the medical training that I had, you know, which is like 12 years after college still did not, was not taught about this stuff. And so, you know, I think there's, what we figured out now is that there are opportunities using modern technology to tap into the recovery system.

to make sure that we can get more sleep at night and we can have more energy during the day without relying on substances and without spending so much time in a constant distress state and that the more we can remind ourselves using breath work or exercise or meditation or yoga or tools like Apollo, if we're not ready for, those activities, because we're not, we're just feeling that bad, which is many people these days, right?

That we can use technology to help us boost a little bit of our vagal tone, our parasympathetic recovery nervous system that says, Hey, friend, you're safe enough to be able to go and experience a stressful, you know, a youth, stressful growth, challenging opportunity right now. That's what we're doing. And that's okay.

And it helps kind of like bring us back into balance or bring us back to baseline. And, and Apollo is, you know, one of the few tools that does that. It can do it in a wearable by just delivering something simple, like soothing sound wave vibrations to the body to help us breathe at a more optimal rate and help our cardiorespiratory nervous system function in an optimal way.

So there's new techniques. It's good news, right? There's new techniques and tools that are coming out that are helping us to optimize the functioning of the body and, and learn more about how to do right by ourselves.

Michael Kummer: Right. Let's switch gears and talk about, you know, Apollo and specifically, you know, the, the vibrations.

What have vibrations got to do with my nervous system or the sense of touch in general? I mean, I know that, you know, if someone hugs me, it kind of feels good. It does something in me, right? And I guess Apollo goes in the same kind of direction where it triggers a response through vibrations, right? Can you explain that, how that works and what happens then chemically in the body and specifically in the brain and with the nervous system?

Dr Dave Rabin: Yeah, absolutely. So this is, you know, everything that goes on around us, everything that happens in the world is related to vibration and frequency. So think about it starting with your sleep and wake cycles, right? Every day. Like, we are diurnal creatures, so, like most mammals, we wake up and we have energy with the sun at a certain time, and that's our daily energy rhythm, and then we fall asleep with the sunset, and we get our deepest, most restful sleep, when it gets colder, and, uh, the heat frequency goes down, and the light frequency goes down, and the sound quiets, right, and all of that is frequency related, that helps our bodies to know Naturally, from nature, literally signaling from nature directly, you, it's okay to rest and relax and get sleep now and recover.

But when you're surrounded by cell phones and screens and, you know, news and responsibilities, like many of us are overwhelmed and pushing ourselves to the limit all the time because of societal demands or expectations. then we end up confusing that frequency system and so we throw off first and foremost, we throw off our circadian rhythms, our sleep and wake cycles, and when that gets disrupted as the core frequency rhythm of our day to day lives, the one that's most common and essential for all of us, then that starts to create all the symptoms in our bodies of high blood pressure, high heart rate, fast looping thinking, anxieties, you know, misinterpretation of eustress, distress, and all of the things that we're talking about.

And so Apollo was a tool we invented for people with the most severe stress. Originally, we started working with veterans with severe PTSD that just weren't getting better, but we were able to figure out how to deliver a very gentle, soothing, Vibration to the body that just like listening to a, to your favorite song on a bad day, right?

It gets you into a nice mood or just like somebody holding your hand or giving you a hug or holding a pet when you're not Feeling good. It helps you feel better. And so that's all frequency based rhythm But it's targeting our ears in terms of music or our bodies in terms of touch And what we're missing more than anything in our lives these days, especially in western culture Is we're missing soothing music Touch.

We're missing that connection to other human beings through touch that we had as children. And so, Apollo, we figured out in the lab at the University of Pittsburgh, in the Department of Psychiatry, where I was leading a research team, to figure out how to deliver a very specific rhythm of slow wave vibration, that when you feel it on your body, anywhere on your body, you can actually, it starts to nudge the body into a state that is an ideal breath rhythm state, which is closer to five to seven breaths per minute.

Everything comes back to breath, by the way. So it starts at five to seven breaths per minute, which is our calm, normal breathing state that we're all supposed to be breathing at most of the time. But if you actually look at what most human breathing rates are, it's 12 to 18 breaths per minute, which is 2 to 3 times that.

And that's stress breathing, that's like distress breathing, that's like, I might be about to have to escape from a lion breathing. Right? And that has implications on the whole rest of the way our body's functioning. So simply by doing some of these self control, self soothing techniques, or using a tool like Apollo, we figured out that you can nudge the body within minutes into a state that's similar to the state if you were taking a few deep breaths, or if you had just finished a yoga session.

Travasana, or you just feel kind of calm and present and embodied in your body. And so that helps to improve HRV. Apollo is the only wearable that has ever been proven to improve heart rate variability in, in near real time. It also improves our ability to be resilient and adapt to stress and trains us how to do it over time, which is really exciting.

Michael Kummer: Right. And I mean, my wife and I have been using Apollo. We've, we've had Apollo for. years. And it was, I think last year that we made a conscious decision of just using it every single day. And my wife has become the greatest fan. And it works, as you said, you know, in near real time and within minutes, no matter what state of mind I am, I put on Apollo and I feel a significant difference.

every single time. And you know, some people might say, well, but you know, this is placebo because you think it works. And I'm like, well, first of all, you know, there is plenty of evidence to suggest it's not, even if it was, you know, I mean, since the mind and your emotions and the way you think about or how you think about things are so closely connected to your nervous system.

Even if Apollo makes me think it helps and me thinking it helps actually does help. It still helps, you know? So, I mean, regardless of how you spin it, you know, it, it, it works. Right, but obviously, you know, there's plenty of science and I've read many of the studies that are out there now. It does work, you know, there have been clinical trials to show that it does what it says and I can confirm and my wife can as well.

It absolutely does with, you know, improving sleep and I think overall, that's really one of the important things, I believe. It's, you know, fixing or reducing your stress response in the moment is certainly important and one thing, but improving your stress resilience so you deal better in the moment. In the moments or in those cases where you don't have access to any tool, right?

I think that's equally important because I ultimately want to be more robust, more resilient because stress is probably not going to get any less in the future. I would argue it's probably going to get worse. So I want to be prepared. You know, I want to be the best version I can be to deal with all of that without falling apart.

Dr Dave Rabin: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I'm so glad to hear that you and your wife have had the same experience that, that we've all had because it's been a life changing technology for us. And, and to put any skeptics at, at bay, we started this not as a product company, but as research into how to create new treatments for stress that are, that people can take out of the office and use safely, whether you're a child, an adult, or an elderly person that don't require a clinician or a doctor or somebody to.

walk you through it or prescribe it to you. And we've done, you know, the first two studies we did were double blind randomized placebo controlled crossover studies that showed unequivocally that Apollo vibrations, this specific layered rhythm of vibration, is specifically improving statistically significantly heart rate variability and it's improving recovery from stress.

and improving cognitive performance under stress, which is really interesting. And now in the upcoming studies that are going to be published this year, we've seen significant improvements in deep and REM sleep and total sleep time. And it's just by calming the nervous system that we are engaging in this effect, very similar to deep breathing.

But I think the overarching principle that you alluded to around resilience and, and prevention is actually the most important concept for people to take away, because what we've learned from modern neurosciences is that there's Adaptation, which resilience is a measure of how adaptable we are, how likely are we to bounce back from something that's challenging us, right?

Of any kind. And that adaptation is actually our most powerful skills as human beings. If we didn't know and learn how to adapt, if we were not born with the ability to learn how to adapt, we would quickly and effectively individually and as a community. We would not be alive today, right? So adaptation is the most important skill that we have as human beings.

And on top of that, it is also trainable, right? So the, so I think going back to what we were talking about earlier, the more that we challenge ourselves to grow in safe environments, And by, and also by reminding ourselves that we're safe in environments that might seem unsafe, that we're not actually under a survival threat, the more we can train our bodies to be at their adaptable peak.

And, and what's interesting about adaptation is there's no limit, potentially, to how good we can be at adapting. It's like a wonderful metaphor for human potential, right? We don't know what we're capable of as human beings in this life. So the whole point is to discover that. And by focusing on learning how to adapt and be resilient, we actually challenge ourselves to experience the unexperienced and know the unknown of what it means to be human in this life, which is really

Michael Kummer: right.

So, um, can you use Apollo too much? I mean, what if I have it on all day? Is there a downside to that?

Dr Dave Rabin: No downside to using Apollo. That was another reason why we built it the way we did. All technologies that were neurostimulation technologies that came before mostly worked with electricity. And when you apply electrical stimulation to the body directly That has a time limit because electrical stimulation can over activate or under activate certain parts of the body too much and they can cause shock, you know, certain side effects that like shocks and burns and other things where you don't want too much electric electricity applied to you.

And similarly, you don't want too many drugs because drugs that you take from the outside, our bodies become dependent on the drug for the release rather than the drug as an occasional tool we use to help us get into a certain state. And so. When we designed Apollo, we were focusing on a literature base from the academic literature that showed that sound waves, like music, are actually harmless used as much as you want.

And soothing touch is also harmless used as much as you want. And so we focused on that and then we were able to show that what's really interesting is that people use Apollo quite a bit and the more that people use it, the better the experience gets, the better their sleep gets, the better their biometrics get, up to about eight hours a day of using Apollo, that you can get continuous improvement

Michael Kummer: in an

Dr Dave Rabin: almost linear relationship with your sleep if you're using it that much.

That's that old. I would say the average that use that people have with the product is about four hours a day, day and night, and they're just scheduling it in the app or using the AI subscription, and it turns on automatically to make sure that we're recovered and awake and energized and clear and focused when we need to be, and that we can fall asleep and wind down and calm down and meditate and do all those relaxing things and recovery things when we need to.

And what's interesting is when we track people's data, people actually use Apollo at lower intensities over time. So as people use it, they actually become more sensitive to it, which goes back to exposure as the exposure in the form of exposure therapy, which is that the more you do it, the easier it gets to get there because we're training the nervous system, how to get there more quickly and teaching the body that this is a state that's accessible naturally.

Michael Kummer: Gotcha. You mentioned audio and I know that we are at our time limit here in a moment, but is there audible? Yeah. It's all inaudible, right? You don't hear anything other than maybe when it vibrates against your bone or something you might hear the vibration but there is nothing that from a sound wave perspective, you would hear.

Dr Dave Rabin: Yeah, the benefits of Apollo are entirely based on the inaudible sound. And the inaudible sound is basically the sound waves that come out of a subwoofer. If you've ever heard like big bassy music, it's the same range as that. So it's audible, but it's barely audible. And when you wear it on your body, you shouldn't be hearing it.

And the effects that come from, the benefits that come from it have nothing to do with your ears. They work entirely through your body, your bones, and your skin.

Michael Kummer: All right. Very good. Well, I appreciate it so much. I was super interesting. I learned a couple of new things, especially as far as, you know, hormetic stressors and eustress versus de stress.

That was super interesting. I will let you know when the show airs, I'm going to include, you know, discount codes and everything I have and reviews, uh, links to my reviews in the show notes. And again, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Dr. Rabin and until next time. I hope there's, I'm sure more to talk.

Maybe we can do a second episode.

Dr Dave Rabin: Yeah, we'd love that.

Michael Kummer: Um, thank

Dr Dave Rabin: you so much for having me. This was really,

Michael Kummer: all

Dr Dave Rabin: right. Thank you. Thanks, Michael.