I've known about your work for a very long time, admired it for a very long time. And one of the things that excited me about being able to sit down with you today is that our laboratory has studied breathwork, your laboratory is studying breathwork. And I know that you've been doing a study on the so-called Wim Hof method, which I'll let you familiarize our listeners to.
Some of them are familiar with the Wim Hof method, others are not. I think a lot of people think of Wim in terms of his role as the ice man because of cold exposure. But of course, he has.
breath work practices that mirror things like tummo breathing and other things. But maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you're doing there and what you're interested in discovering. I realize it's too early to give us the results, but hopefully we'll come back and do that at another time.
But what is the study? What motivated the study? And maybe I can convince you to give us a little teaser of what you're discovering. So for many years, I mean, I think my first paper when I...
was a graduate student with Bruce McEwen was about this idea of positive physiological stress. And so I've always been wanting to really understand what's positive stress, how can we induce it. And instead, for many, many, too many years, I've been studying the dark side, toxic stress, trauma, caregiving, and how that is, can take a toll on the body without the right resilience and resources.
And now I'm very excited about The opportunity to just focus on different ways that we can stress out our body and mind in short-term bursts that might promote stress resilience. And the body-based strategies are concrete, they're quick, they're also my favorite strategies. I probably have internalized a lot of the mindsets and the things that I've learned from meditation and what I feel the...
biggest bang for the buck is, you know, if I'm waking up like super jittery with a big stress response because of X or Y, it is actually something like a, you know, a HIIT type workout or taking the dogs for like a really brisk walk or like burning up that energy in my body is a very big effect size for me personally. Everyone has their answer. different ways that they can see the biggest shifts in daily stress. So I've been looking for ways to create positive stress besides exercise. We all know about exercise.
And I met Wim Hof at a meeting where we talked kind of back to back. And so I had kind of heard something about crazy Iceman climbing up the Himalayas. I really hadn't.
He has 27 or more world records. Yeah. for that sort of thing. Yeah.
So he, so I got to hear, I got to do the breathing with him during this conference and I just felt like elation afterward. I was like, what was that? And then he heard about telomeres and he was like, I need to know if my method is affecting cell aging. He loves research. And so we, he helped us design a study that we've been working on at UCSF.
With my colleagues, Wendy Mendez and Eric Prather, it's been many years and it's funded by the John W. Brick Foundation, which is very focused on what are non-drug ways that we can help mental health. So it was a very good fit for all of us to come together and design the study. And we have been basically comparing low arousal relaxation methods, mindfulness, slow breathing to positive stress exercise and Wim Hof method. And One of the things that we've learned in a big way is that regardless of whether we're creating deep states of ease or hermetic stress in the body, that short-term burst of either aerobic activity or the extreme breathing, people feel better, period. So three weeks later after this experiment of doing their practice every day, they were either randomly assigned to the high arousal or the low arousal, the level of stress, anxiety, and depression fell dramatically.
everyone. So many paths to changes in stress. There are probably very different physiological pathways, and we can talk about that more when we get to really look in depth at our physiological data as well as our blood-based data.
But what we do know is that the Wim Hof method did create daily positive emotion that increased over time, just like your study on sighing. And so even though there are different mechanisms, they were selectively boosting feelings of positivity. I love that.
You know, that's very unusual to get a very selective positive effect. Super interesting. I can't wait to hear more about the data.
So I gather, and by the way, no is a perfectly fine answer. I gather that you're not going to tell us about whether or not there are telomere changes yet, or maybe that's not possible to detect in this kind of short-term study. So what we're going to look at, we don't really think that telomeres can change very quickly and telomerase may.
So we're going to look at mitochondrial enzymes, telomerase, and gene expression patterns. And as you know, we can look at many different mechanisms and pathways with gene expression patterns, especially with these new kind of assays where you can look at, you know, 7,000 different proteins like the somalogic. And so we'll get to see, well, what's the pattern? You know, did we really change patterns of acute stress with these different types of stress resilience interventions? And.
in terms of the physiological reactivity, there are ways that we can examine both the stress response system, the sympathetic nervous system, and the parasympathetic response system. And I will tell you that while we're still preparing the results, there were very different profiles from the different interventions that make us think that there's a lot of specificity, even though everyone feels better. The way that they got there is very different in ways that were impacting both the nervous system and the brain.