Activate Your Parasympathetic Nervous System with Double Breath Technique:

Hi, Remission Biome. So this video is on how to activate your parasympathetic system really really quickly. You don’t need anything except your body, your breath and two minutes. All you do is this you take two sharp deep breaths in with your nose and then breathe out through the mouth. I am gonna demonstrate.

Let yourself relax, let yourself relax and do it again. Let yourself relax, let yourself relax. Okay, so this type of a breath system is actually meant to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and should calm you down really quickly.

There is many different ways of doing this in you can use pandiculation, you can use meditation but this breath technique seems to work extremely well for many people. Andrew Huberman, one of my favorite neuroscientists, has been talking about it for ages. So, I wanted to bring it to the Remission Biome Community today. Enjoy.

Calming Down the Sympathetic Nervous System at Night:

Hi everyone. Today we’re gonna talk about calming down the sympathetic nervous system but we’re going to focus on calming it down at night.This is a really big issue and if you have ME/CFS or LongCOVID you probably have this nighttime insomnia,  you may have sleep onset insomnia and you’re just not sleeping well. It’s very characteristic in these conditions that there’s a wake up around 2 or 3 in the morning because of an adrenaline spike that it’s harder to get to sleep once again because the adrenergic system is activated and so people experience sleep onset insomnia. They may wake up at night more often because of pain or sleep apnea and in general sleep is just much shallower.

So, if you’re using a sleep tracker you might see that your REM sleep is quite high because that often happens in the morning but your deep sleep is very low and that’s what happened that’s the time of falling asleep. That’s really critical so when you first fall asleep you generally enter into a deep sleep period for about one to two hours and if your adrenergic system is really heightened or if you’re doing that wake up at 2-3 in the morning and your sleep cycle has shifted.You can miss your deep sleep all together.

So, there are not wonderful options for dealing with low deep sleep but the bottom line is is that you need to calm down your sympathetic nervous system, calm down these adrenergic reactions and try to ease into your nightly slumber.

So one of the key things for me throughout this journey has been HRV tracking: heart rate variability and I use an Oura ring. I’ve used about ten trackers from different companies and this is the one that I love and I always come back to. It’s also not the most expensive  So it’s a really great option. One of the phenomenal things about Oura is that in addition to tracking your HRV all night, it offers an option to track it for short periods of time during meditation or just stillness and you can look at the response you have to different interventions or supplements or exercise or something else that you’re doing.

So one of the strange things that I ran into with my sleep tracking a little while ago is, I realized that my HRV was actually being negatively affected by some of the supplements that I was taking at night.

So I have been taking this mix of apigenin and lemon balm and passion flower and valerian.  This is a pretty classic mix you often find it in these combined sleep supplements like ortho sleep from AOR but of course the dosages are a bit lower. So I’ve been using this mix of products for quite a while and I forgot to take them for a couple nights. I think I was, who knows? Anyways, I noticed that all of a sudden my HRV jumped by about ten points when I didn’t take these supplements. So it’s like hmm OK. So it took me about two weeks of trial and error taking different combinations but I figured out in the end that in actual fact the lemon bomb the valerian are actually known to reduce HRV. The two that are not are passion flower and apigenin. So this was really interesting and I realized that it needed to shift some of the timing of my medications to optimize my HRV and I also looked again at re-adding some things that I had removed. So generally, I have been taking adaptogens like ashwagandha rhodiola and alphanine during the day. Well, I decided to start incorporating some of them at night again. So now I’m also taking the ashwagandha at night.

These are just a few tips and tricks about calming down your parasympathetic nervous system. Everyone needs to experiment for themselves but without a really good HRV tracker this is pretty difficult.

I hope this was helpful and I really hope you have a great day. Please follow us on Remission Biome and remissionbiome dot org. Thanks. Bye everyone.

 Vagal Interventions Truvaga Part 1:

So, we’re not using the Truvaga to cure ME/CFS or Long COVID. We’re using the Truvaga so that we can cure ME/CFS and Long COVID and this is an incredibly important distinction and not so subtle. Without calming the system down first, any intervention, even if there was a cure or a treatment for ME/CFS or Long COVID right now, it probably wouldn’t work because your system is so hyper vigilant that anything coming in is just being blocked.

So within Long COVID, the system is in this state of chronic stress and adrenergic shock. It’s like a heightened state of emergency. You know in the past you would have done yoga nidra, it would have helped calm down, it would have felt good but you’re no longer dealing with the same body. The physiology has changed. In this heightened state of shock you can do yoga nidra but the positive relaxation benefits just don’t get through. Now this is adaptive. The system knows that you’re in a crisis and it’s gone into protect itself at all costs mode. And, this is why things that wouldn’t have caused an adverse reaction in the past all of a sudden do, even aspirin.

So the hypervigilant immune and endocrine system is on this knives edge in terms of trying to identify potential threats. And we all know in cases where the threat level or the emergency level is really high, a lot of mistakes are made. So, at the very worst even if there was a treatment or a cure for ME/CFS it probably wouldn’t matter for many people because their systems are so overactive, so hypervigilant that they’d flag it as a potential risk and create an MCAS reaction or an allergic reaction.

So what do you do here? Well, you need to calm the system down first and this is why we’re so interested in vagal interventions like the Truvaga. There are many ways of working on vagal tone and trying to calm down the hyperadrenergic system but the bottom line is, is that for many of us this will be completely key and before you actually get this under control, none of the interventions have a great chance of working.

I hope this helped. We’re Remission Biome. Have a great day.

Vagal Interventions Truvaga Part 2

In distinction and not so subtle, without calming the system down first any intervention, even if there was a cure or a treatment for ME/CFS or Long COVID right now, it probably wouldn’t work because your system is so hyper vigilant that anything coming in is just being blocked.

So, within Long COVID the system is in this state of chronic stress and adrenergic shock. It’s like a heightened state of emergency. You know in the past you would have done yoga nidra, it would have helped calm down, it would have felt good but you’re no longer dealing with the same body. The physiology has changed in this heightened state of shock. You can do yoga nidra but the positive relaxation benefits just don’t get through. Now this is adaptive. The system knows that you’re in a crisis and it’s gone into protect itself at all costs mode and this is why things that wouldn’t have caused an adverse reaction in the past all of a sudden do, even aspirin.

So the hypervigilant immune and endocrine system is on this knights edge in terms of trying to identify potential threats. And we all know in cases where the threat level or the emergency level is really high, a lot of mistakes are made so at the very worst even if there was a treatment or a cure for me CFS it probably wouldn’t matter for many people because their systems are so overactive, so hyper vigilant that they’d flag it as a potential risk and create an MCAS reaction or an allergic reaction.

So what do you do here. Well, you need to calm the system down first and this is why we’re so interested in vagal interventions like the Truvaga.

There are many ways of working on vagal tone and trying to calm down the hyperadrenergic system but the bottom line is, is that for many of us this will be completely key and before you actually get this under control none of the interventions have a great chance of working.

I hope this helped. We’re Remission Biome. Have a great day.

Increasing HRV and Truvaga:

Hi, Remission Biome. There’s a couple of things I want to mention here with the Truvaga and why I’m so obsessed with HRV. So, there’s a couple of different time scales which are really critical and the first question is will the Truvaga use increase our mean HRV over time?

The literature is out on this question but the theory suggests that it should. And, as HRV is a clear indication of the health and resilience of the autonomic nervous system, increasing HRV over a longer time period is a really important goal.

So obviously, we are not there yet. We’re on day 5 and I really feel I really need weeks to months to see whether we get long term consistent increases in HRV from using the Truvaga.

The second thing is why I’m so obsessed about these short term changes in HRV? Now, short term changes in HRV don’t really mean a lot but we do know that it means that your autonomic nervous system is changing. So we can use this as an indicator and if a decrease means that your system is less resilient and an increase means that your system is more resilient. Maybe we can optimize the Truvaga use to actually work in concert with HRV. So, for example, one of the things I’m really interested in is, is if I have the setting at the right level will my HRV decrease or will it even increase?

So far, every single time I’ve used it my HRV has decreased for a short period of time and then has increased again. But maybe my setting is too high. So the first time I used it my setting was twenty five. The second time I used it and every subsequent time it’s actually decreased. So today I was actually on an eight. Whereas yesterday I was on a nine and the day

before I think I was on a twelve. So the level where I’m stopping the increase in the intensity seems to be going down day to day. However you can see from my reading that my HRV did take a good almost twenty point decline, um soon after using it. So I hope this helps to explain a little bit about why I’m so interested in using HRV as a measure, um of effectiveness of the Truvaga. It’s not really long term effectiveness that I’m focused on right right now, it’s short term optimization.

Alright. Bye Remission Biome

HRV and Truvaga- Day 6:

Hi Remission Biome. Some vagal tips and tricks for Truvaga day number six. The first thing I wanted to say is that there’s a great survey from organcam on twitter and she found that seventy percent of people who used a vagal nerve stimulator reported some benefit from a little benefit to a major benefit. So pretty incredible results.

When she tried it herself, she found that side effects made it pretty difficult to continue. So where am I at today? Well, it’s day six. Every single day since I started using the Truvaga, my nighttime HRV has decreased by one to two points. So last night I hit a low for me of twenty four. It should be thirty. Between thirty-thirty five. So, I’m not very pleased with my sleep results for HRV.

I’m using the Truvaga on a pretty low setting. Today I actually used it on a fourteen, so higher than the last couple days. However, I was kind of hoping that I would start to see some HRV sleep benefits at this point and I’m not. Another thing is that I’m still getting these really steep HRV crashes right after I use it and today I tested a twenty minute session post stimulation and it still didn’t increase to my baseline let alone where I started today because my HRV was forty when I started out. So, I’m really on the fence. I mean obviously I’m going to keep testing this for the rest of the month to get a really full picture of the results but the Truvaga just may not be for me.

Vagal Stimulation and My Own Experience:

Hi Remission Biome. I wanted to talk to you today about vagal stimulation and why my situation might be a little bit different than yours. The first thing is that I’ve been doing vagal stimulation for a really long time, almost a decade, using meditation and many other techniques. So my vagal tone is actually pretty good and my HRV is excellent in comparison to what it used to be. So now it’s around an average of thirty whereas when I first got sick it was an average around of ten, not so great. However, before I use the Truvaga, I calm my system down, I get into resonant breathing, get some brain and heart coherence going on and kind of feel it in the body when all of a sudden your system just kind of gets into sync. Then I use the Truvaga for two minutes. It turns off automatically and then I continue meditating for another ten minutes or so and just enjoy the feeling and restabilize.

I’m using the left side rather than the right side in part because we have a splenic parasympathetic connection on the left side. So it may be doing a little bit more it’s really key when you’re using a microcurrent device and you’re attaching it to the tragus like this to do TV and to do transcutaneous nerve stimulation but with the Truvaga or the gamma core, you can actually do it on both sides. So it actually doesn’t differ.

We’re also doing a bunch of other stuff and we’re gonna be testing these things in concert with the Truvaga as well as separately. So baking soda, antacids, PR lotion, to get some baking soda straight into the skin.

The meditation is extremely important and if you can’t calm your brain down try doing some yoga nidra. Really great way to get into a calm zone and resonant breathing. If you don’t know anything about it is really worth looking up. It increases HRV very very quickly but more importantly it gets your system into this coherent state of connection.

So, I hope this helped and I will continue to update you on the Truvaga vagal nerve stimulation journey.

Long COVID, insomnia, sleep, vagal interventions:

So, you have Long COVID or ME/CFS and you’re reacting to foods. You’re not tolerating supplements or medications. You feel trapped. What do you do? Well, the best advice is actually to focus on optimizing sleep but this isn’t helpful because if your autonomic nervous system is in a hypervigilant mode there’s no way that you’re going to have healthy and normal sleep patterns. And this is one of the things that many people start to experience early on in their disease course is that all of a sudden they’re having insomnia and they’re waking up at two to three in the morning and this occurs because there’s a cortisol adrenaline stress spike that happens around that time and it’s very related to MCAS and histamine reaction.

So it seems like a real problem. You need to sleep to get the body into a healthy state where it can actually heal but until you actually get into a healthy state you can’t sleep. So what do you do? Well, Remission Biome is focused on vagal nerve stimulation at two different times in the protocol.

So, for the first month we’re really optimizing vagal tone. We’re using many different techniques to do this and the very first thing that I had us both do was increase our meditation. Now, I know this is a really high barrier for many people and so we have lots of different suggestions other than meditation for how to increase your vagal tone.  But the bottom line is for the very first month. This is the focus this is pretty much all we’re doing. We’re not taking the antibiotics yet. We’re not taking anti-inflammatories for the brain yet. We’re just focusing on increasing our HRV and increasing our vagal tone.

The other point in the experiment where vagal tone is also gonna pop in is right at the end.  After we do the course of amoxicillin and of course we’re also gonna be taking doxycycline at the same time. We’re gonna use a vagal nerve stimulator to kind of shock the system and cause a cell danger response to occur and there’s some great theory that suggests that this is kind of the last trigger that’s needed to turn off the cell danger response. So vagal stimulation is used as the very first step in the protocol and also one of the last steps in the protocol.

If you’re interested in ideas such as these please follow us on Remission Biome. We’re posting videos pretty much every day and there’s a lot of information on twitter as well as on our website remissionbiome dot org. Thanks so much. Have a great day everyone.

NSDR-Non Sleep Deep Rest:

Hi Remission Biome. Today we’re gonna be talking about non sleep deep rest. And non sleep deep rest or and asdr is another name for yoga nidra.  But for those secular folks that prefer no woo and no spirituality will stick with non sleep deep rest.

I really recommend that you check out the YouTube videos by neuroscientist doctor Andrew Huberman on non sleep deep rest. He has produced some incredible content. Remission Biome uses a type of non sleep deep rest called yoga nidra. And it’s really a method of getting out of the brain and getting into the body. It’s not active. You’re laying down and all you’re doing is thinking and putting your attention on different body parts.You just slowly move through the body parts guided by whoever you’re listening to and you relax. It directly impacts the parasympathetic nervous system and it calms down that flight fight freeze reflex which is so key.

I’ve been doing variations of non sleep deep rest and yoga nidra for years now and one of the most interesting things I’ve found is that my Oura ring which I used to track pretty much everything and most of you are probably getting a little bit bored about hearing at this point. Well, my Oura ring shows that when I’m doing non sleep deep rest or yoga nidra I’m actually in deep sleep and this is pretty incredible and some nights it seems like the only deep sleep I actually get is when I’m actually doing yoga nidra and non sleep deep rest and I think it’s because the Oura has learned a little bit. There are neural network has kind of learned to pick up on it. But the bottom line is is that the body actually perceives this state of relaxation. The same way it perceives deep sleep and you can imagine how restorative that is.

For people who have Long COVID or ME/CFS, we often don’t get a lot of deep sleep. That’s slow wave sleep early on in the night. That really is critical for healing and so by using non sleep deep rest and yoga nidra and similar techniques to calm the nervous system, you can actually simulate deep sleep even during the day and you can add a little bit of extra healing time. People who use NSDR and yoga nidra on a regular basis find it incredibly restorative even a twenty minute quick break during the day is like taking a nap or a rest. I really recommend you check it out.

So, I hope this was helpful. Please follow us at remissionbiome dot org and in particular check out our complete protocol and follow us on remission biome at twitter. Really hope you have a great day. Bye Remission Biome.

Oura Ring HRV Intervention Tracking:

Hi, Remission Biome. This is a tip and a trick about how to use your Oura ring for tracking yoga nidra, interventions and other things you do during the day.

One of my favorite ways of actually monitoring interventions and how well things are working is by using the Oura ring to track my heart rate variability. This is a really simple process. Now you can use this with other devices. You can do this using your polar chest strap and an app.

But i’m just gonna focus on the Oura ring here specifically because I think their unguided meditation section is really unique. So what you do is you go to the check mark or you go to the plus mark and you go to the meditation section and you pick unguided meditation. Now you’re gonna want to choose a length of five minutes or more. Otherwise you won’t actually get an accurate HRV and skin temperature estimate.

So once you’ve chosen your five minutes or more. You lay down or sit down and you get into a very very still position and mindset. The reason you need to be still is because HRV is very very affected by movement even muscle twitches can actually affect HRV and throw off a reading.

So the way I like to do things is I like to do one session before I use an intervention and then I’ll do a session during and after an intervention. So for example when I’m using PR lotion, I do five minutes without the PR lotion.I then put the PR lotion onto my neck or onto my body and I track another five minutes.

So I can actually see the HRV at baseline before I use the intervention and HRV during or after the intervention. Obviously the longer you do this for the better reading you’re gonna get. And I actually generally try to do these types of readings for twenty minutes not just the five minutes.

You also get to see how your heart rate reacts. Usually it goes down and you get to see how your skin temperature reacts. And this is an interesting measure because when your skin temperature increases, It’s an indication that your body is getting into a more relaxed state.

So you actually want to see an increase in your skin temperature reaching an asymptote and then it goes flat.With the HRV: the heart rate variability you obviously want it to increase rather than decrease during an intervention so we’re always kind of shooting for higher heart rate variability rather than lower heart rate variability. I hope this was helpful. Please follow us at remissionbiome dot org and I hope you have a really great day. Bye Remission Biome.

PR Lotion for DOMS and HRV:

Hi Remission Biome. So, today I’m giving you an update on PR lotion. The first month of the Remission Biome protocol is focused on preparing the system for the antibiotics and we’re doing three things. We’re using vagal interventions, we’re using supplements to calm the neuroinflammation and we’re using probiotics.

In the category of the vagal interventions, one of the products we’re using is PR lotion, which is a really interesting product comprised of baking soda. Now PR lotion is used by a lot of athletes, particularly cyclists. Potentially it gives them a slight performance advantage but interestingly, for us in particular, if you have Long COVID or ME/CFS, it also works very effectively on DOMS which is called delayed onset muscle soreness. And I’ve found that when my muscles are really lacticized by the end of the day, if I put PR lotion on that muscle, myalgia goes down very quickly.

A whole bunch of members of the community has jumped on this bandwagon and done testing over the last couple weeks and interestingly enough, there’s just been an overwhelming response. It seems like PR lotion actually does decrease muscle soreness even in ME/CFS.

One of the other really unique things that it does is it actually acts on the stress response. So it can directly impact your SNS/PNS value, ratio and we’ve found that when we put PR lotion onto the neck to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system, we actually get better increases in HRV and more calmness than we would normally.

So we’ve actually made PR lotion and official part of the Remission Biome protocol. I use it before I use the Truvaga and I’m also gonna be using it before I use the ultrasound. But I haven’t gotten there yet. I also put it on my neck in this general area here of the vagus so around the carotid before I meditate and before I do yoga nidra. And like I said before, I find it incredibly helpful to use at the end of the day when I’m experiencing a lot of fibrolike myalgia pain.

I hope this helps and I hope you follow us at remissionbiome dot org and look at our complete protocol. Have a great day.

Yoga Nidra:

Hi, Remission Biome. Today I’m gonna be talking about yoga nidra and the parasympathetic nervous system. So when remission biome started, the very first thing I had Tess and I do was to institute a daily yoga nidra practice.

Yoga nidra is not yoga, it’s not movement and yoga nidra is also not meditation. It’s not sitting up and trying to clear your mind of something. Yoga nidra is a really unique way to tap into your unconscious and all it involves is lying on the floor or the bed and then focusing your mind on different body parts.

We recommend you do this for, well, an hour a day if you can that would be great. But if you could only do a twenty or a thirty minute yoga nidra practice, that’s great as well.

Yoga nidra directly impacts the parasympathetic nervous system, so it helps calm the flight or fight or freeze response and this is one of the key parts of the Remission Biome protocol.

All of this extreme anxiety and tension, that feeling when the phone rings and you jump or a loud noise is heard and you jump out of your skin. It may have been happening for a while for you but that’s not really the state that the body should be in.

So, if you’re experiencing this heightened state of anxiety, I really recommend trying a practice like yoga nidra you’re not trying to get out of your brain. You’re not trying to think or not think about anything and this is really the helpful part of yoga nidra for many people is that you’re trying to get into this relaxed state through the body by focusing on the body.

There’s obviously a gazillion videos out there on yoga nidra but I really love the ones by Tanis Fishman on insight timer and this is a free app that you can download.

So please follow us on Remissionbiome.org and check out our complete protocol and follow us on twitter at RemissionBiome. I hope this was helpful and I hope you have a great day.