never never never too late okay well let's talk about how you got here because i think it's really interesting when i'm talking to guests and hearing about your story and what led you to develop this device but i know there was lots before that as well so it'd be lovely to kind of hear that

Well, as you can see, I am a grey-haired founder.

And so I only started this in my 50s.

Spent most of my career actually away from sort of the health side in the environment arena and stepped back into the health because I just really, really felt that humanity as a species is living with a lot of stress and problems at the moment.

So I thought, right, I've got to figure out what my gift is into that space.

And funnily enough, at the time, my eldest daughter, actually the one who's now got two amazing, beautiful grandchildren, She was really struggling at school and she was coming to the end of school.

School's a tough place, isn't it? And she really had a lot of anxiety and it showed up for her because stress always plays out in the body as really, really severe tummy pains, such to the point where she needed to go to the doctor.

And it's not the, it's not one thing that's going to fix everything, but when you're doing other things, activities like meditation or breath work or other things with it can be so helpful and that's why I really like your device because you're promoting not just using the device but you're also promoting doing things like meditation and there's like nice little programs in it so could you talk us about the device that you've created how it can be helpful and a little bit about the program and the and the other things that come with the app

... and powerful in Our ability to heal from something that maybe we've been dealing with for a very, very, very long time.

Absolutely.

So it's all about trying to give us more capacity, isn't it? As a lot of, uh, people use the phrase, uh, you know, a reset, and I don't think that the nervous system is, y- is that, is that simple as being able to sort of hit that, hit that reset button.

And the reason I say that, and you explained it so beautifully, it doesn't matter.

We've got this funny way that we deal with stresses, haven't we? It doesn't matter, as you say, a long shopping list of things that sadly can happen to us.

Our brain only has one response to it, and it's, you know, the sympathetic nervous system-driven response, releases cortisone, you know, nore- uh, norepinephrine into the brain.

And it's like not a very sufi- as you say, it's a very blunt, blunt response, isn't it? It's all designed to protect us from getting injured.

in the middle of the night?

exactly.

Yes.

Yeah, you can definitely get some anxiety.

So first thing on wearables is don't ever look at a 24-hour window.

But some general trend lines over months could give you valuable insights.

But don't get held up because you've not had one bad night's sleep.

So a quick summary, heart rate variability is a useful marker of how balanced these two arms of our nervous system are, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.

What kind of things can improve your heart rate variability?

So how do we look at that in terms of benchmarking against the norm?

Well, I would always say just benchmark against your own data, whatever that is.

People always ask me, what's a good HRV? And I would always push back and say, it is incredibly personal signal.

So, you know, don't suddenly think my HRV is low, although...

To unpack that a little bit more, HRV is measured in a time domain.

So it's measured in milliseconds.

And mine can average.

What's out there in the market? How did you come up with your idea and how it's different and what it does?

How can we recognize what stress is when we're feeling something and actually embrace it for what it is in order to move forward so it doesn't build up and lead to something chronic? So here's a

nice way to think about this.

When you get stressed or when you're excited about something, what's the difference? In both cases, your heart rate rises.

You know, if you think about going down a roller coaster, are you stressed or are you excited? Your heart rate's going to rise.

But what else happens? And this is the answer to your question.

It's two things.

So firstly, when you're stressed, you've got this little thing in the middle of your brain called the amygdala.

I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how much of modern medicine is based on male physiology rather than women's and how that actually plays out with stress.

So if it's not enough just to chant and hum or sing, and we want to actually go in and stimulate it, talk about how do you stimulate the vagal nerve and what kind of effects do you get from that?

Well, the interesting thing is there's a couple of places in the body where the vagus nerve is very, very close to the skin.

One of them is the nerve comes out from around the brain and it comes down on the side of the neck.

So this branch of the vagus nerve called the cervical branch, you can stimulate from there.

So that's one place.

And that's where implanted vagus nerve stimulation started.

So actually a little implant, a cuff that wraps around the nerve has been used for about 30 years.

just sure yeah i have mine here i just can't put it on because my uh i have my ear plugs in but i have like this is about how big it is but you you can demo it if you want yeah