Building Resilience from the Inside Out with Heart Rate Variability with Dr Torkil Færø.

"We’ve placed too much value on the psychological part of the brain and ignored the physiological foundation beneath it. Real resilience starts with your nervous system." - Dr Torkil Færø

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Torkil Færø—a general practitioner, emergency physician, award-winning filmmaker, photographer, and author of The Pulse Cure. We explore how real-time health data, particularly Heart Rate Variability (HRV), can serve as a powerful tool for tracking stress, building resilience, and creating lasting change in how we live and lead.

Torkil shares how the death of his father prompted a transformation in his own lifestyle, leading him to investigate the connection between stress, the autonomic nervous system, and long-term well-being. He breaks down what HRV actually measures, why it's a better indicator of resilience than most people think, and how smartwatches and other wearables can shift health ownership back into our hands—quite literally.

We also unpack the hidden impact of evolutionary stress patterns—like constant comparison, negativity bias, and our brain’s over-adaptation—and how these deeply rooted traits drive chronic stress and undermine our physical health.

What I appreciated most was how practical this conversation was. Whether we were discussing the importance of sleep, active rest, breathwork, or expressive writing, Torkil emphasized that meaningful change starts with awareness—and that physiological resilience is the bedrock of emotional and cognitive health.

What we cover in this episode:

• How to use HRV to monitor stress and improve well-being
• Why the autonomic nervous system is foundational to health and resilience
• The surprising impact of modern stressors like comparison and overstimulation
• What your resting heart rate reveals about your long-term vitality
• Why good sleep starts two hours before bed
• How journaling and slow breathing stimulate recovery systems
• The critical difference between challenge vs. threat-based stress
• Why individualized tracking is more valuable than general health metrics

If you're looking to take back control of your health in a sustainable and science-backed way, this episode is packed with tools and insights you can start using right away.

Chapters

• 0:08 Introduction to Resilience
• 2:30 Meet Dr. Torkil Thado
• 6:53 The Journey to Health
• 13:15 Understanding Heart Rate Variability
• 15:37 The Role of the Autonomic Nervous System
• 18:07 Psychosocial Stressors and Their Impact
• 26:19 Exploring Self-Awareness
• 38:15 The Power of Individual Health Tracking
• 52:05 Importance of Sleep and Rest
• 1:03:13 Final Tips for Managing Stress
• 1:04:59 Episode Wrap-Up and Key Takeaways

Transcript

Speaker: 0:04

This is It's an Inside Job, and I'm your host, Jason Lim. This is the show where we explore the stories, strategies, and science behind growing resilience, nurturing well-being, and leading with intent. Because when it comes down to it, it's all an inside job. Well today's episode is full of practical insights that's going to help you take charge of your health and well-being now some of the key benefits you'll gain from tuning into this episode was using hrv to track your health you'll discover how heart rate variability or hrv well how it can serve as an invaluable tool for monitoring your body's stress levels and shifting your focus from simply preventing disease to achieving overall well-being. While another benefit, well, that's overcoming stress with self-awareness. You're going to learn how modern psychosocial stressors like constant comparison and negativity bias, well, how it impacts our mental health and how building self-awareness can help you break free from these patterns. Now, a third benefit, balancing your lifestyle for better health. You're going to gain insights into how integrating sleep, nutrition, exercise, stress management, can be supported by wearable technologies to improve your health and activate your parasympathetic nervous system for more restorative rest. And your parasympathetic, well, that's that rest digest part of your autonomic nervous system. Now, don't worry. We're going to go do a deep dive and explain all of this. At least my guest will. Now, that's just the low-hanging fruit benefits. There's going to be a lot of plenty of other practical and fascinating takeaways you'll discover by listening to this episode. So who's my guest? Well, his name is Dr. Torkil Thado. He's a GP, emergency physician, an award-winning photographer, filmmaker, and the author of the best-selling book, The Pulse Cure. Now, in this conversation, Torkil shares his insights from his personal journey and his expertise on how to use modern tools like smartwatches and HRV tracking to find balance and reduce stress in our fast-paced lives. So without further ado, let's slip into the stream and meet Dr. Torkin Farrell. Well i'd like to welcome everyone back to it's an inside job today i have a special treat i have a brilliant man uh brilliant doctor and then author he's a renaissance man torkil welcome to the show, thank you jason very nice to be here i was wondering could we kick off the conversation by you briefly introducing who you are and why we are here today together yeah at least i know who i am uh so i am a doctor i've been a doctor for 25 years i'm a freelance doctor and because the reason why i became a doctor in the first place was to be able to travel the world i knew that as a doctor the body and the mind are the same all over the world i had been traveling in australia in Canada and I got to understand that as a doctor you can work part-time and then go traveling and live your life and that was what I wanted was an adventurous life to experience as much of the world as I could in these 80 years that we are hopefully granted on the earth and I found that being a doctor would be great it's like sitting on the front row to life to see life unfold in front of you and to have a role in it so that you are there when the dramatic things happen, when everyday things happen and you see. What do people do and why do they do it? And so that was my drive towards becoming a doctor, which is different than most people's drive, which would be to help people and to be very interested in health, which I was not. So treating people and understanding health was kind of my ticket into the curiosity of knowing what people do. So it was not until my father died at 73 from cancer that i understood that okay i need to take a look at my own health here i need to change the way i am because i was weighing 20 kilos or 40 pounds overweight i did not exercise i did not care about what i was eating as a doctor i was used to working night shifts and and not caring much about sleep either so basically everything that i would later write about in the pulse cure i did wrong and i was drinking two glasses uh two probably three glasses of wine every day and so i was doing i was also using nicotine i was using snooze that you may know in norway and and i was probably i was smoking for at least 10 years so because i even as a doctor we didn't think that it mattered so much what you did with your lifestyle we had the impression that um if you did everything right you may live for two or three years longer but making the food from the bottom sleeping longer exercising all this would maybe take even more than two or three years to do so. Of course, this proved to be very wrong. So now we know that if you do all the right things, you can live 24 years longer. And that is also my clinical impression from paying attention to when people die. Part of the job of being a general practitioner in Norway is writing death certificates. And i could clearly see that the ones who live beyond their 90s. They have checked on all these different things they have done all the right things and if you do all the wrong things you'd be lucky to pass 70 you know so i can i can understand that so anyway so my entrance into to the medical field and my career in the medical field has been different actually i thought i thought i was jumping off the career train at the first possibility because the first thing i did after my internship was to buy a car in the states and go traveling to mexico for four months and then when i ran out the money i came back and for many years that that was my lifestyle. So that i am the first person to to write the book on how to use wearables and heart rate variability to track our health um that is beyond my comprehension that is uh because um i'm kind of just a normal doctor but uh but the power of the tool of the wearables and heart rate variability and being able to track your autonomic nervous system is a game changer that can totally change the whole way we see we look at medicine it turns the focus from disease and until avoiding disease and it takes the power from the doctors and the healthcare system into your own hands in real time accessible at all times so it's a it's a it's a big shift. That is why we're talking. Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. I don't say this to compliment you, but as an observation, I found the pulse cure. As I told you pre-interview that I devoured that book within two days. I'm quite voracious when it comes to reading, especially when they're very science-based. But you write in such a way, you're like a scientific journalist. You can take the complexities of the science, of the physiology and such, and you write in a way that any lay person can read and there is one quote well there's a number of quotes but the one i if you don't mind if i can read a quote from your your your book you said or you wrote i'm sorry we often place greater value in what we might be able to accomplish by treating the psychological part of the brain and end up undervaluing the potential that exists in treating the physiological part we have a top floor to be proud of and impressed by this part of the brain is also dependent upon having a solid foundation. This is the self-regulation nervous system or the autonomic nervous system, ANS for short. And on this podcast, you know, we were talking about Torquivat, one of the major things we focus on is resilience and another one being well-being and of course leadership, self-leadership in a sense too. But, you know, I speak a lot to sort of the cognitive, emotional base. But one thing that really resonated with your book, and that's why I pulled out this quote, it's the underlying physiological, because that sets, as you said so eloquently, it sets the foundation for everything. In psychology, we have something called core effect. And this really resonated with me, because core effect is based on two things, the intensity of an emotion, and you also have the valence. Like there's no bad or good emotions but there's emotions that are very uh comfortable and there are that are very uncomfortable and that always explains me i was wondering why core valence was you know if we don't sleep enough or we're hungry but again your book was able to at least in when i read it bring it down to the autonomic nervous system i was wondering could you speak a little to the autonomic nervous system and explain to our listeners from a doctor's perspective what that is and why it's core to the foundation of who we are. Yeah, so the autonomic nervous system is the base, the foundations in our brain. So it's a system that we share with all vertebrates, all mammals. So it's an ancient system, like 100 million years old, and basically unchanged through that time. So it's like we're having what I call in the books, like we are having a living fossil at the bottom of our brains that we have been overlooking as doctors we hardly learned anything about it in medical school um just that it was a fight flight and freeze system and rest and digest so anyone like me who was never scared and and never fighting or never fleeing from anything i would assume that i would be in the parasympathetic state all the time because because the autonomic nervous system is is divided in two parts it's divided in the sympathetic part which activates us and mobilizes us towards what we want or away from what we don't want something that's chasing us or something is scary and um we're supposed to be in that state two three hours every day that we can see when we put these variables on hunter-gatherers that still exists today. The rest of the time we're supposed to be in the parasympathetic mode, the restful mode. And in our modern day, we are not so much in this state. We are turned on to some degree round the clock. And we are not constructed to tolerate this. It's not a sustainable physiology. We will get sick, and we do. It's estimated that 80% of the modern day lifestyle diseases that we treat now is based in too much stress that results in a low-grade chronic inflammation that will manifest in all the body's organs, including the brain. And so we need to get control of this autonomic nervous system. And that is possible through the heart rate. Because what is so almost magical in its simplicity, is that the heart rate can reveal whether we are in the stress state or in the de-stress state and the degree of it and then we probably have to explain heart rate variability, so heart rate variability is a concept that i heard of the first time five years ago which should tell you almost everything you know even as a doctor i had never heard about it i was I was reading it in a book in psychiatry from Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, that heart rate variability is a metric that they use in American psychiatry to evaluate their patients, whether something is working or not. And the heart rate variability is a way to look at your heart rate like through a magnifying glass. It's a more precise metric of your heart rhythm. And if you are in the parasympathetic mode, in the restful mode, then when you breathe in, the heart rate will go up a little bit. And when you breathe out and there is less oxygen in the lungs, the heart rate will go down a little bit. Not very much, but it's measured in milliseconds. And if you are really restful, you can detect it by feeling your own pulse. It is just as, you know, the ancient Greeks and Egyptian Chinese doctors, Indian doctors would be able to feel the pulse and to feel the state of the patient. But if we are in a stressful state, then this ancient system interprets the stress that this is an organism in danger. We can't afford to relax now we have to push through the heart has to push through even though there is less oxygen in the lungs so it will be a very steady pace and of course with the modern technology the smart watches and smart rings and all these devices that are now just exploding and in popularity can detect this and to give you an estimate of your stress in the moment and accumulated throughout the day and night and through artificial intelligence and like millions of people using them they can make good estimates of what would be a good sustainable balance for you and give you the information. So this is the big revolution, I think, in modern medicine, where. In my mind and of course i i'm biased that this is as important for stress-related modern diseases that antibiotics are for the old old diseases that are infectious diseases so this is we are now treating inflammation-biased diseases where the other diseases that we have conquered that is the infection-based diseases that we have vaccines and antibiotics and so So, yeah. No, I find that fascinating what you're talking about, about the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic, or what you wrote so eloquently in the book was the fight-flight when we're activated and the rest-digest, just to keep it simple for the conversation. What I found interesting, I didn't think about this. I always thought that when we are in a neutral state, we're just ticking along, there's no stress or what have you, that, you know, there is the balanced system, but what your book articulated, and I didn't know this, you said the, the SNS, oh, sorry, the fight flight is permanently active and it's, it's, it's about around 120 beats per minute. And then you described the rest digest or the parasympathetics like a break, we can tap the brakes and that we actively engage. It slows down the sympathetics. So our nervous system is around, or sorry, our heart is between 50 to 80 beats per minute. So the 50 to 80, I understand that's sort of an average, but that's a good healthy range for the average person. Well that healthy range i would say would be 50 to 65 so if you have a resting heart rate of 65 70 up to 80 it's normal but it's not healthy so it's uh it's not not optimal so i would say that um you should really have a resting heart rate uh measured by the by the wearables and they often measure at night um that should be less than 65 i would say uh then uh then i would say that it's okay no that's i think you know these numbers the one thing i liked about the book it is it is very measurable as you said we can take agency we can take autonomy back and not constantly have to run to the doctors and get blood tests and all sorts of tests but we can actually do it real time. And I just, so what I'd like to do is maybe back up a little, because your book talks a lot about sort of what we can do physiologically. And I'd like to explore that to sort of activate the parasympathetic more, the rest digest part of our autonomic nervous system. But you were, you also articulated sort of psychological stressors and sort of kind of the innate evolutionary programming that's part of our wetware, our brains. I call them psychosocial emotional stressors, or from my background, that's what we call them. And I was wondering if maybe we can talk about, there's three of them. First of all, you were talking about how we naturally compare ourselves, depending if we compare ourselves upwards to those who are more successful, or we compare ourselves downwards, how that can affect our autonomic nervous system. Could we explore the first one there for a second? yeah as mammals we are the strength of mammals for the 100 million years is that we compare ourselves to others which which say reptiles and other don't do but mammals it's kind of our job to evaluate whether your opponent is stronger or weaker than you so so that is our very very special ability that we are using all the time and if you look into the newspaper you will see that what are the news okay somebody's going down somebody's going up somebody's fighting who's winning you know so this is a constant game um and we do it all the time and even without thinking. And of course in the old days and the reason why we do that is because it's important for survival because then they didn't fight there were less fighting when you could see clearly that i'm going to lose this fight i'm i'm not going to box against mike tyson you know i'm going to lose and both will will will profit from that so it's been a survival method that has been good for mammals like us um and um, The trouble is that earlier we used to live in tribes of 150 people, and there was a limit to how much it would be every day, you know, to compare yourself to these others. But now we are in contact with 150 million, you know, through magazines and through the best people, the most beautiful people and richest people and everyone. And we keep losing in this game. So we feel inferior a lot of the time. And just the action of comparing ourselves to others is a stressful thing and the hormones. If we compare ourselves to others and we feel better then we get serotonin the release the feel-good hormone and if we lose the comparison thumbs down then we get cortisol the stressful hormone so um and this has been throughout evolutionary history it's been something that made us survive that that we can speak here today is it's because our ancestors like millions of years like hundreds of millions of years back have been doing their job and been good at this comparison comparison comparison comparison and um but this is hurting us today so today is not of use it just keeps disturbing our lives giving us stress is an obstacle to enjoying our time on earth so we have to kind of use our intellectual brain to over over overturn this mammalian brain from the limbic system where this function is to to say that i don't care about that it was useful millions of years ago now i'm just going to enjoy my life i'm not going to care whether anyone is richer and more beautiful than me the second one we talk quite often on this show depending on the guest which is the negativity bias where we are if i may just take liberties here is where we are. Our brains automatically again tend to search for threats danger and hazards. Constantly in our environment our brains are like hypersensitive to trying to locate that and so in psychosocial pressures meaning that most people at least in developed nations are not constantly worried about being murdered or starving or what have you. But it's psychosocial pressures, as you articulated in the first one, is where we're constantly comparing ourselves. And if we're not wary of that, we may see someone, they may say something to us, and then we see that as a threat. We see the negativity in that. And so the negativity bias. I was wondering, could you, I found the third one very interesting too. The third psychosocial stressor was the extreme capacity for adaptation. Could you fill us a little in on that? Yeah, so as humans, we are very good at adapting to our environments. This is why we have gone out to Africa and have inhabited every zone on the earth, the climate zone. And we can come into any situation and after some time, we'll get used to it. So I remember, for example, going to Angola as a doctor. I worked for the Doctors Without Borders. It was as a student. And so I was the first one going out to the Norwegian Doctors Without Borders. And just after a week in Angola with mind injuries, with children dying at my hands every day. Falling asleep to gunshot sounds and being in this terrible place where only two years earlier, half the population had been died because they had been under siege for two years and half of them died so so there was so much tragedy happening but but anyway suddenly that was normal, you know that you have the capacity to be okay now this is my world and the and it also goes the opposite way so that even when you come back then you take all this for granted so even if even if we live in a way that humans throughout history would have been dying to to to achieve, we take it for granted with a like you just shrug our shoulders and. Because we we adapt to it so and that has again been the success formula for human beings to be able to achieve what we have been achieving but it's also something that makes you kind of blasé about our current surroundings you know and you look for the negatives you get used to having everything that we have and then don't think much about it so we will be ungrateful even if we have everything and what shocked me most after in angola was also to come there and see the happiness, i would expect and this was before internet um so i would go there and expect just to see misery in these conditions but i saw a joy of life that i've never experienced until i came to ethiopia some years later though but uh but i saw a joy of life um that they didn't take every day for granted. And uh and appreciated the moment and uh they were together laughing more what i remember my goal is like laughing faces and then i came home and then i was not prepared because when i came home i was just seeing sullen faces you know unhappy faces the newspapers full of complaining about the small things and and then i because i had originally planned to work for only for like doctors without borders and red cross to go around the world maybe in the war zones working as a surgeon war surgeon and so on that was one of my plans but when i came back from angola and saw that we had everything and we were still depressed they should be depressed but we. That didn't have anything should be depressed. But we who had everything, we were depressed. And that was a puzzle that really tricked my mind. You know, how come, how can this be? And this is, I think, part of the reason why, you know, I wrote The Camera Cure, I wrote The Pulse Cure. I think that this curiosity about how can this be has been kind of the foundation of this issue. Research and curiosity about how all the all the books i've read i've read probably around now 500 books related to to mastery to psychology to to physiology to to find out why why do we do what we do and it just shows that you know these these three psychosocial pressures that our brains are you know we're just born with it just it speaks to a lot and you speak later than in the book but It's about self-awareness. It's about being in the present and kind of actually checking with the narrative running through our head. As we say in sort of clinical and cognitive science, you know, the human operating system kind of goes from head to heart to hand. We think something, a narrative, and generally that's just automatically generated. And it's generated based on these three principles you've talked about. And then that triggers some sort of emotion. And then obviously the autonomic nervous system. And then that triggers the behavior, the hand, whether we either engage or disengage with life. And yeah, and depending upon the either encouraging narrative going through our head or the discouraging narrative based on what you're saying, constantly comparing ourselves upwards, constantly searching for the negatives and problems in life, constantly chasing after what we don't have instead of, as you said. Being in the present, appreciating and showing gratitude to what we have. And I believe, honestly, from my experience working with this so long, that self-awareness is the key to override this programming, as you've just mentioned, and also what you've written in the book. Yeah, we have to override these feelings. Otherwise, they will destroy us unnecessarily. There's no reason for these feelings to crush your enjoyment of life. Which it does to so many people um and uh yeah which is why i wrote the camera cure is it's kind of a antidote to this thinking uh so um but also what's also interesting you know is that even basic physiology below this mammalian brain the reptilian brain with the disturbance in sleep in stress caused by poor food, alcohol, lack of training, poor physiology, will also give a reaction that makes you feel bad. So a lot of people say that after they ate differently, food that did not activate their stress system, their anxiety was gone. So it just shows that we have placed too much attention to the speaking part of our brains. And we, as humans, only started speaking at the estimate. Of course, they don't know. They didn't talk to them. but they estimate that we started speaking 200 000 years ago and we have brains that are far older than that and this non-verbal part of our brain is affecting our verbal part of the brain much more than we would like to so um so we often ask you know is it is it is it. Psychological or is it physical but it's often physiological it's somewhere there in between so um so so that i think is why so many people feel so much better uh when they get their stress system in balance yeah i'd like to hop into the physiological uh aspect of uh heart rate variability or hrv in a second i just wanted to come back to what you talked about the reptilian brain, because it's the reptilian brain, as you said, is the foundation for everything, psychological, cognitive, emotional, what have you. In your book, you wrote something about the reticular activating system. Now, I understand these are a ganglia, a ganglia just being a cluster of cells for the listeners that sit at the base of the brainstem. And I think it's linked to what you've talked about, the three sort of biases we have, negativity bias and looking upwards and such i was wondering could you explain a little about the reticular activating system and how it can function yeah the reticular activating system is kind of the the basic system for attention it is this is what makes while you're walking in your own thoughts in the street and you hear a car squeaking then you suddenly turn around or you see something unexpected happen in in the periphery of your vision, you suddenly look there to see, can it be a threat or can it be something that I want? Can it be a nice looking lady or whatever, you know, depends on, depends on your brain. It's also what if you go into the clothes shop and you take a quick look around, often you'll see, Oh, that's the jacket I want. You know, this is this attention system that quickly will find what you want and identify what you want or identify a threat. And it's in the, as you say, in the base of our brain. So this is what keeps our attention going. And this is why it's a problem because we are always looking for things. And of course, in our commercial world, there's always some messages that is going for the system. You know that you walk in the street and there is a commercial for clothes and you can listen to the radio and they want you to buy this and this product. And so we are constantly bombarding this system with people that grabs a little piece of our attention. And you could think that this is not so harmful but it takes just small chunks of the most valuable thing we have which is time which is a non-renewable thing you know and we are constantly looking for everything that is trying to connect to us and trying to make money out to us so anyway so this is an automatic system if we didn't have that you know then we would not react to something. Dangerous or something that we want so this is a kind of a the basic thing that would make any reptile turn towards you when when you came in come into their peripheral vision yeah you know because after i read that section of the book i kind of dived in and explored a little more about this gang uh this cluster of cells the reticular activating system we'll just call it the ras. And it's just that as you said it's it's the heart of attention and it's based upon what is important to us so back to the three points you made in your book if we're allowing negativity bias or comparison upwards or constantly um regretting the things that we don't have or constantly striving well these become what's important to us they become the filters in which our reticular activating system is constantly searching for and obviously that kind of psychological narrative will trigger uncomfortable emotions which will obviously you know trigger our stress system or the sympathetic to fight flight and what you said before is that self awareness of you know being appreciative showing gratitude uh kind of looking for the good things in life this counteracts these um wetware programming that evolutionary gave us and this is also i guess a direct psychological or cognitive way to control to some extent the autonomic nervous system yeah yeah yeah exactly and and this is also our reticular activating system is working like the algorithms in spotify and in facebook you know in exactly the same way it's trainable so it's like this artificial intelligence inside of our heads which because of course when we walk into the same clothing store. The two of us will look at two different things because this reticular activating system has learned that okay this guy likes red coats you know and this guy likes leather so we will immediately go to two different places and react to different things and it works just like the algorithms um that it kind of thinks okay and and this i've been exploring a lot as a photographer because i've been teaching photographic workshops in 60 workshops in in 11 countries all around the world in ethiopia cuba sri lanka palestine many places and what continues to amuse me is that how different we see that if i put these 15 participants out in the same village they will come back with totally different pictures and so that so their reticular activating system this is where i got into this interest will point them to different places based on their history up till now so and once you can exploit that and you work with your reticular activating system. Then you will take better pictures if you take pictures that you think you were supposed to take i can see that immediately if it's not in tune with your reticular activating system because you will not be good at that so um but often you will over value this way and underestimate your own experiences that makes you take better pictures if it's in tune with your personality. In the first part of the episode, Torkel shares his journey toward better health, spurred by his father's death from cancer. Realizing that his own unhealthy habits could shorten his life, well, Torkel transformed his lifestyle and his career focus. He emphasized the importance of adopting habits that can extend longevity. He introduced the concept of tracking health with variables, particularly heart rate variability, HRV, shifting the focus from disease prevention to personal well-being. Torkel explained that how modern technology like smartwatches, well, how it can help regulate our stress by balancing the autonomic nervous system. We also did a deep dive into the impact of psychosocial stressors. You know, with Torkel highlighting how evolutionary traits like comparison and the brain's negativity bias, well, how that can contribute to modern day stressors. He also emphasized the importance of self-awareness and managing negative thought patterns, explaining the physiological and psychological factors that influence mental well-being. There is no doubt that psychological resilience and emotional resilience are two skills that we all need to find a more robust mindset. But underlying that entire principle is physiological resilience. And that's what we're going to talk about and discover in part two of my conversation with Torkil. Because here we're going to dive deep into heart rate variability, but also the smart watches, the technology that empowers us to track our own health and to monitor and to make cognizant decisions to improve our health, to improve our energy, to improve how we manage stress, whether that's emotional, whether that's psychological. But the foundation to it all, folks, it's the physiological part. Well, let's slip back into the stream, into part two of my fascinating conversation with Dr. Torkil Tharo. I think one of the important things that you stipulate in the book, it is very individual. So Jason shouldn't compare himself to Torkil per se. Torkil shouldn't compare himself to a good friend or a colleague and such. Is that what I understand? Exactly. So the heart rate variability will be different for each person. And there's supposed to be 30 to 50% individual personal genetic variation. So that means that even if you go to population study and you put 10,000 people in, Then the lower the heart rate variability, the more disease of any kind. And you can just Google almost any kind of disease and add heart rate variability and you will find connection to that. But if you go on an individual basis and go into these 10 000 people and pick out two people it does not necessarily mean that one with a higher hrv has a better health than one with a lower chances are that this is true but it doesn't need to be so because of the big genetic variation, so you shouldn't compare yourself to others but to your own optimal heart rate variability so say that you take one week or you relax you're out in the sun to some extent you. Eat you write the right food you you sleep you exercise a little bit and so on so then then you can see okay what is your optimal heart rate variability when you are really relaxed and i think also in the book you you mentioned other than just genetics a genetical 30 influence you also talked about age you talked about gender you talked about the season for example in right now where when we're recording here we're moving into autumn but this this will be maybe a better um season for our heart rate variability than say deep winter for example yeah yeah so this would be the right way to start on the you know after the new year and make these changes so we would have a better chance now that we have a better heart rate variability we are rested after the holiday or hopefully and we have more willpower because heart rate variability is also coupled to willpower the higher heart rate variability the easier it is to resist temptations. Which of course is why they put all the temptations at the end of the store when you have less heart rate, less willpower left because willpower is, you can deplete your willpower by making choices. It gets lower. So, yeah. I don't remember the question again but yeah it was no it wasn't really a question it was just a comment yeah yeah the different of ages yeah and it also has something to do with age so the heart rate variability will fall quite steeply from your youth until you are maybe 45 and then it will flatten out which is the reason of course why cristiano ronaldo and other athletes that come into their 40s although there are like literally in his case billions of of uh kroners to be made it uh he will not be uh able to because the body will not forgive and make sure that he will recover and this is why also that you as a doctor i'm almost astonished by how much you can how much beating your body can tolerate until you are 40 without dying but then after you're 40 45 you really have to take care of your own health otherwise you yeah you will be sick yeah so when we're looking at heart rate variability is that the number the rmssd is that the number we should be looking at yeah yeah so apple apple watch uses another metric which is sdnn but most of the devices will use rmssd um that is i think the the best one. Okay so and then you can see your heart rate variability over time that is maybe the most important to see the fluctuations over time so you can identify like a two-week period that okay this is going down i need to step back a little now um so um take it easy yeah so what i'd like to do is just i'm wary of time um i'd like to maybe shift and not divulge all the answers in the book, but you have different stages of this travel, as you said. And I believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong, Torkin, you've listed them based upon priority or how important. The first one, which for me was a no-brainer, was sleep. But a lot of us, you know, are like, we say, ah, sacrifices of the sleep gods. I think you said it in the book, I'll sleep when I'm dead, right but if you don't sleep he's soon to be dead per se right can you speak a little to sleep because you you mentioned about eight hours being a healthy but i saw i've been reading that depending upon it could be between six and a half or seven to nine hours i was wondering if you could expand on that yeah so it's general it will be a difference in the sleep need also so that would be somewhere from seven to nine hours and it will be individual how much sleep you need and it will also depend on your sleep consistency so if you have a better sleep consistency which means that you go to bed and wake up at more or less the same time every day less than half an hour difference is good enough then your brain will be very effective in going through the sleep phases. So then you can tolerate maybe seven hours i don't think that less than seven hours i've not seen less than seven hours being recommended so i think that's kind of a limit um and um so then probably you can go down to seven hours so i think most people should be around eight hours. Um some people may need nine hours i've heard so um and that is probably the most important thing you can do to to give the possibility for your body and brain to recuperate through through the night so then you just put on an automatic system that does the job for you you know in all the other stages of what i call an expedition um it's something you have to do yourself you have to choose whether to not drink alcohol or drink alcohol you have to make the right food you have to do the exercise. You have to quit smoking and using snooze and so on. So, but sleep, the body is made for that. So you just allow it to go to sleep and we need more sleep than we thought. And it's not until maybe the last 10 years that you have been aware of the importance of sleep, that it's not just a nuisance if you're tired. It's dangerous it can double the risk of cancer if you according to matthew walker with his excellent book why we sleep or would for we solve it in norwegian um if you sleep less than six hours compared to more than seven hours you double your risk of cancer and nobody told us that and so i knew all the night watches i've had you know throughout my doctor career you know even though i felt terrible you know there's no you never feel as terrible than between four and five o'clock when there's a patient coming and maybe it's even a necessary demanding patient then you don't have much patience yourself uh so so uh it's not only uncomfortable but it's downright dangerous it's increasing your risks of cancer so um it's not. Good and and all this dip and i can see if i have a continuous glucose monitor i can see that if i eat the same food after a night of poor sleep my blood sugar will be a lot higher with the exactly same the same food so it's all connected everything is connected in this inflammation so whether you don't sleep enough if you're using snooze uh nicotine or alcohol whether you are over or under trained whether you eat food that you're not supposed to whether you don't have the ability to calm yourself down and if you have poor relations and you are lonely and if you are too warm if you are too hot all these things are connected to each other and if you have the wrong microbiome it's all connected and if you don't get enough son also all these things are connected and makes for poor mitochondrial function and a poor autonomic nervous system function and and will have consequences in in all of your organs and the problem for us as doctors has been that we have been too specialized so the kidney doctor looks at the kidney and the and the psychiatrist looks at the brain and the ear nose and throat you know at the different departments and the cardiologist at the heart and we haven't really understood that the common denominator for all of. These the diseases that hit all these organs is chronic low-grade inflammation. Now we know that and i think still i would be surprised if more than 20 percent of the doctors know this. I think 80% of the doctors and healthcare professionals are not aware that chronic low-grade inflammation is the root cause of all these different diseases still. And I think your book is, you know, it's a platform for us to educate ourselves. Because just briefly, a sidestep, when you talked about the mitochondria, those are the little engine machines in our things that generate ATP, sort of the currency of the body. We have the gut microbiome. I had Dr. Stephen Gundry on. He wrote some books on this from California. But I just want to backtrack to sleep because I think a lot of people think, oh, eight hours, that's what I need. Okay, so I'll go to bed at 11, get up at 7. But people sometimes don't realize they have to calculate into that sleep time or being under the sheets that most people, at least from what I understand. Can be awake an hour, shifting, going through the circadian rhythms and popping up every 90 minutes. And that there it could be an hour hour and 20 hour and 30 minutes of wake time but it's it's kind of sporadic throughout the night so have i understood that wrong like so if i need i need roughly about seven seven hours seven to seven and a half hours sleep but i kind of calculate eight eight and a half hours i'm in bed am i off target here or no you're no you're spot on yeah so it's a more or less if you if you're looking for seven and. A half hour i think you must be in bed at least eight hours eight hours and 15 minutes and it would probably be individual as well but i find that i often will get a half an hour less effective sleep than the time in bed so it will be somewhere around that yeah sorry we're harping too much on sleep but i think it's so key because you've also talked about the uh restorative switch that the final two hours before we go to sleep is vital for effective sleep can we. Go down that rabbit hole yeah yeah yeah i love rabbit holes uh so um we need to wind down we need to go softly in for landing to get our our brains to go into the right sleep phases i used to think it was totally opposite but if i had been awake and was tired and was just crashing on my pillow that must be a very good sleep you know we called it in norway we called it a good sleep heart got soviet but that proved to be once i started using the wearables that proved to be terrible sleep you're too stressed so the best sleep i used an ecg monitor for the first two years so i had 700 readings from an ecg monitor before i understood that garmin had the same system in their watches and then I took the 10% best nights and the 10% worst nights and tried to see okay what's. Where's the trick here yeah and the trick was that i was in the parasympathetic restful state in the two hours before sleep and then of course in the worst night the opposite i was in a stressful state until i went to sleep um and uh when i've been doing more reading i see that this is also um also what other people find and luckily also i'm we have made a website called pulskur.no the pulskur.com with 4 000 members so i get so many results so it's not only my information but from thousands of people that generally experience the same thing that to get a good night's sleep you have to start winding down maybe one or two preferably two hours before and you can do that by reading a book that is one of the most restorative things you can do. Listening to music dimming the lights uh calming yourself down with something that you can see on your watch is calming because it's not necessarily calming so many people find out that what they thought was calming them down like watching netflix and having a bag of crisps will keep their stress levels way into the night and then they take that bag of crisps away and start reading instead and then they get much better sleep so um yeah so so and to have your bedroom cold um in celsius degrees that would be 15 to 18 degrees celsius i'm not sure what that would be in fahrenheit but that's okay we can talk celsius they can figure it out yeah yeah right. So that would be good um yeah it should be also totally dark should be totally dark you shouldn't be able to see a hand in front of you if it's too much light then it will it will disturb the melatonin production in your brain and make you less sleepy so um so even if you wake up in the middle of the night you know keep your eyes closed and and breathe slowly and try to get back to sleep instead of instead many people advise people to get up but i don't do that i stay asleep, start counting or breathing slowly and and stay in the dark you know i think also you know liquids when we're thinking just even if it's just uh clean water just water tap water in a sense or bottled water whatever that maybe not drink so much close to that sort of uh restorative switch right as you're making it because you know at some point you might gonna have to your body might have to uh you know go to the bathroom yeah yeah yeah so it's better to i try not to drink anything after maybe eight o'clock. Maybe 7 30 even and then but before that it's important to hydrate so, according to andrew huberman on this huberman lab podcast that you should have two and a half liters of water for the 10 first hours of the day so if you if you start at eight o'clock you should then have two and a half liter of liquid until six o'clock in the in the evening and then you shouldn't drink really aloft after that so that you don't have to get up get up at night uh i don't want to walk through all of the things but one of the things i think are very interesting and just in this last one i'd like to talk to you about is about uh active rest and i think in a sense, you know people think an act of rest doesn't rest mean just you know lying down yeah to some extent but can you define what active rest and what it is and why it's so important. Yeah active rest is ways of being able to calm yourself down so that you're not just letting your foot off the gas pedal but you're also pushing in the brakes and the best ways to do that is and the easiest way is the breath work to breathe slowly to breathe six around six breaths a minute seems to be a sweet spot for most people so for example you breathe in for four seconds and out for six seconds which would be then six breaths a minute that is a way of calming yourself down and then we're also tricking the autonomic nervous system because when you breathe that slowly it's a signal to this ancient part of your brain that it's quiet out there we can we can rest and digest now there's no there's no imminent danger threatening us so otherwise why would he close his eyes and breathe slowly, you know? So our brains are in a dark space and needs the senses and interpret the senses and signals, physical signals, to make a decision on which state we should be in. Should we be in a restorative state where the immune system comes out from the bushes and starts cleaning up? For sure. Or should we be in a state ready for some fighting? Yeah, because I've done some other research on these sort of, you know, sort of hacking the physiology to calm down, well, to calm down the autonomic nervous system, per se, or the heart. And the other one I heard is like, you know, when we are stressed, you know, that the blood will retract back into the core of our bodies and our hands get all clammy and cold. But if you kind of warm your hands up, it kind of tricks the body that, oh, because blood's flowing back to the periphery of the body. And that kind of does. or the other thing is when we're in a stressed fight flight state you know our metabolism goes offline we're not really hungry because we want to just get away but i also read that if you rub your lips you know these are nerve endings uh exposed nerve endings part of the metabolism so if you rub them what that does it stimulates the metabolism and the autonomic nervous system things as you said okay in this dark skull in this cave that our brains are located that's the stimulation is like okay he must be eating something he's touching his lips or whatever right and that can also be a process so i thought that was very interesting um. And there's two points to that, because you can be stressed in two ways. You can be stressed in the, how would you say, that you think you can do it. It's a competitive state. Oh, like a challenge versus threat. Yeah, challenge versus threat. That was the word I was looking for. so if you're in the challenge mode and you think you can do it and then your heart rate will pump a larger volume in each heartbeat and your peripheral arteries will dilate to give more blood into the peripheral organs like your muscles and your brain and all your organs. Um that is when you are hunting you know when you're going for that mammoth or lion or elephant whatever you were hunting in those days to increase the chances of putting down the animal but when we are in the threat mode there's another another kind of reaction then the heart will beat faster but with a smaller volume in each it's a beat and the arteries and in the body will retract so that there will be less blood flow to these organs and this is what you can almost see in a soccer game in real time when when when the situation shifts from one goal to another you know that suddenly the other team seems to run so much slower you know and the other one's so much faster excellent example and and and this is they believe it's because that the only time you were in the threat mode was when you were hunted down by the other animal and then a good For survival, it was important to have little blow flow out into where they could bite you, and so you wouldn't bleed to death. But of course, many people are in that threat mode day and night. And that is probably part of the reason why they get all the diseases. Because if you are depressed, if you have anxiety, you die probably 10, 15 years earlier, not from mental disease, but from physical disease. And so these organs may have a constantly lowered blood flow to these organs. And this is part of that, what you were talking about before, low-grade inflammation, right? It's just constantly on. You have this cytokine storm constantly. Your immune system is trying to deal with it. But everything in your book, especially obviously sleep and exercise and eating well and such and socialization, these are all part of the exploration or the trip. Sorry, I can't remember the word you used. The sojourn or the journey? Expedition. Expedition. Expedition. I get everything else. Yeah it's because it's because change changing your lifestyle is really hard uh so just like if you go out on an expedition you know you're going out on a hard adventure you need to be prepared before you go and you need to be braced for for some struggle um so is to make sure that people know that okay you need to put all your energy into this you know because i think the For me, the act of rest was so, it was really great because, you know, I talk about writing from a clinical psychology perspective. I'm constantly asking people to write or what I call expressive writing. And basically, you know this, but the magic behind that and why it's so effective, it's almost like talking to someone else. But the idea is to articulate your abstract thoughts and emotions and write them out. Put them on so you can see the concrete words. And if it doesn't look right, then you do it. It's a way of processing. And what I also recommend, Torky, is that people don't use a keyboard. Write it out in your own Hanskrift, your writing, your cursive. Because what that does is that when our brains are racing, you can only physically write so fast. And so if you have to try to get your thoughts and emotions down on paper, your physical limitations of how fast you can write actually brings down the thinking. It slows down the emotions. And I'm presuming automatically from this great talk we're having is that it quiets down the autonomic nervous system because you're starting to process. That's why writing or I think talk therapy are two of the best tools anyone could have. And that could just be talking to a good friend, close friend, a trusted individual. Yeah yeah absolutely yeah i do writing myself so i write a diary every day so uh and i mean oftentimes now i don't have time for it but i do this uh longhand writing in the morning it's a writing two or three pages of just intuitive writing just whatever comes to mind so it's uh it's in and that is nice to do in the morning because it can affect what you do in the day often you get the best ideas because you're still in the in the party and you're in the hypnagogic state you know with a you're still a little bit in your fantasy and you're starting the the realism of the day so it's a good time to to to write like that the intuitive writing and i guess that's a great way of setting the filters on your reticular activating system what you're aware of what you want to pull in more of yeah absolutely yeah you know i i have many more questions but i'm very respectful of time we've gone just a little over an hour i was wondering is there any last advice or tips or suggestions you could leave with our listeners today that would be that it's possible to get control of. This system you know it did to an extent that would surprise you and you would be surprised what you will experience once you get your stress levels in orders and i have yet to hear of anyone not getting any surprises or or not benefiting from it so so that would be it and maybe something of us guys don't always talk about but that but for women uh the menstrual cycle is a big factor here so uh just to mention that that the women listening that that the week before menstruation when you can see that on the curves of your of your watch i can see the lowering of the heart rate variability if you're able then for that week to diminish your your to mitigate the stress to sleep more don't train so hard release the stress and then you can flatten that curve and and and get less of the pms symptoms that so many people have so so that i would think is a an important thing that's a huge tip That's a very huge tip. Well, Torkil, it's been a blast. Folks, if you're looking for a fascinating read that will literally and metaphorically change your life, it's The Pulse Cure. It's available in, I guess, Kindle form or e-form and also paperback. Well, Torkil, thank you. It's been a blast and definitely an eye-opening conversation. And I'm glad we have this conversation because for selfish reasons, I get to pick your brain to understand your perspective. So thank you. Yeah, very nice to talk to you. Well, we covered a lot of ground today, you know, from the importance of tracking health through heart rate variability to the profound impact that psychosocial stressors have on our mental and emotional well-being. Torkel emphasized how the interplay between our psychology, our physiology, and our behavior, well, how it's crucial in managing stress, and how self-awareness, Well, how it can help us overcome negative thought patterns. We also explored the benefits of adopting a healthier lifestyle, integrating fitness trackers to monitor stress and using writing as a tool to process our thoughts and emotions. We can call this journaling or expressive writing. But the idea behind it is to take our abstract thoughts and emotions and to articulate them into concrete words. And this is one of the best ways to process our thoughts and emotions. And it has a direct effect on our physiology. You know, Torkel's personal journey toward well-being, well, it was shaped by his father's death and his own lifestyle changes. Well, it served as a reminder of the importance of proactive health management. I mean, we explored a lot in this episode, but if you want to do a deeper dive and actually understand to empower and take control over your health, I highly recommend checking out his best-selling book, The Pulse Cure, where it dives deeper into how modern technology can help us balance our nervous system and improve our overall health. And of course, as usual, you'll be able to find all the links to the book, the audiobook, the e-book in the show notes. Personal thank you to you, Torkil. It was a fascinating conversation. I learned so much and my curiosity was completely piqued. I mean, I've been doing this now for, well, since I finished your book, Monitoring My HRV. And I have to tell you that all those data points collected gives me so much insight into how I am doing physiologically, psychologically, and emotionally. And that has made me more resilient because there's nothing like having hardcore data to back up how you feel. At least that's my perspective. Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed this episode. You can always rewind or replay to your heart's content. But if I may ask you for a slight favor, if you can go out there and recommend this podcast to someone you think could benefit from this episode or the podcast in general, you'd be doing me a huge solid. Well, thanks for joining me for this long form discussion that you can find on Mondays. And I'll see you Friday for Bite Size Fridays, which are episodes between 15 to 20 minutes. Until then, keep well, keep strong, and we'll speak soon.