The Overstimulated Mind: Finding Stillness in a Noisy World with Dr. Jana Rieger

In this episode of the Super Daddy Club podcast, Dr. Jana Rieger, award-winning health tech innovator, researcher, and co-creator of Breth, joins us to explore how we’re coping (or struggling to cope) with the rising stress and anxiety of modern life.

We dive into the mind-body disconnect fueling our overstimulation and discuss why breathwork is emerging as a practical, science-backed solution not just for adults but for children and teens as well. Dr. Rieger reflects on her transition from academia to entrepreneurship, the importance of creativity and self-regulation, and how simple daily practices can help us reclaim calm without relying on medication.

We're proud to offer Super Daddy Club listeners an exclusive 15% off Breth — the wearable device designed to help you breathe better and stress less.
Just use our link: getbreth.com/superdaddy  your discount will be applied automatically at checkout. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Dr. Jana Rieger
• 5:53 Finding Space for Creativity
• 11:22 Childhood Influences on Creativity
• 17:43 From Academia to Entrepreneurship
• 24:56 Understanding Breathwork Benefits
• 34:22 Building Healthy Behaviors
• 43:17 Vibrations and Health Benefits
• 49:24 Heart-Brain Coherence
• 58:33 Modern Anxiety and Youth
• 1:06:10 Closing Thoughts and Next Steps

Transcript

Dr Jana Rieger : 0:00

This gets kind of trippy, because they found that the heart actually has its own set of neurons, so it's kind of like its own little brain.

Lendo: 0:24

To all our listeners. I would like to welcome you to the Super Daddy Club podcast. We have a very exciting episode for all of you today. Our guest, if I can provide her with an introduction here, is Dr Jaina Rieger. She's a distinguished entrepreneur specializing in wearable devices that encourage people to engage in and stick to healthy behaviors, which is very hard. With a career spanning over 20 years at the University of Alberta, she also has held roles as a clinician researcher, professor and director of research. As the co-founder and CEO of True Angle, dr Rieger's latest technological development is breath, a wearable digital health technology that focuses on reducing stress through guided breathwork practices. Her innovative work has been recognized internationally, including True Angle being named Edmonton Startup of the Year by National Angel Capital Organization in 2021. Dr Rieger was awarded the 2024 Women in Tech Award by Start Alberta, acknowledging her entrepreneurial success and contribution to Alberta's technology ecosystem. Thank you and congratulations.

Dr Jana Rieger : 1:33

Thanks, Lando.

Lendo: 1:34

When she's not busy creating wearables. Dr Rieger loves writing fiction. She published her first novel in 2017, A Course in Deception, and you also host the Enjoy the Life You're Living podcast.

Dr Jana Rieger : 1:46

Yeah, that's right.

Lendo: 1:48

Yeah Well, welcome to Super Daddy Club podcast. We're very honored to have you on and it's going to be an amazing show.

Dr Jana Rieger : 1:54

Thanks, lindo. I'm really pleased to be here and I'm excited about the conversation.

Lendo: 1:58

I guess your intro really sets us up well for this, because you've gone from innovating in slightly different field, like as a speech, language pathologist or therapy sorry and then also with breath and, within that space, with people with anxiety disorders, and then you're also a novelist and just jumping from one to the other. The connecting point is I think it requires some degree of creativity and imagination, and I just wanted to know where you draw that from and if, from one field to another, the process of creating intersect in some ways.

Dr Jana Rieger : 2:33

Yeah, for sure. I love that question because I love creativity and I think that there's so many different types of creativity, whether we're being creative in a more traditional sense and writing a story or painting a picture or whatever it might be, or being creative in whatever we're doing in life, and really I mean every moment of the day we're creators and we're creating what's around us, whether that's something physical or just our circumstances. So I think that one of the things well, there's a few things that have been really important in that creative space, whether it's been as a novelist or as an academic and that is having space, and that means really space in your head to be creative. If you don't have that, if you are just simply you know you got the hamster wheel going on there, and that happens to us a lot there's just not space for that, for creative inspiration. So you know, as an example, when I had no intention to become a novelist I mean I liked writing as a kid but when the idea came to me it was I was on a plane, I was doing one last presentation before I went on sabbatical from the university, so I had this whole year ahead of me of like really open space and all of a sudden it just it just came out of the blue.

Dr Jana Rieger : 3:57

I'm like, oh, this is strange. I'm just going to start writing about this student who's doing crazy things without having planned that. So I think there's something to be said about space. I think the other thing is kind of getting yourself out of a routine as well. So there was one author that I read when I was first into the writing world. Her name was Julia Cameron and she wrote the Artist's Way, and she talks about how, you know, get yourself into different places, go somewhere you've never been, go take a walk, get yourself out of the routine to allow that creativity to come together. And I think that's common, no matter what you're doing in terms of creativity. So I'd say that's where I draw my creative stuff from.

Lendo: 4:42

It's just giving myself that space and a different environment to do some thinking in yeah, and I love that answer because I mean space physical, mental, it can even be spiritual. It can you know you can find space in so many ways kind of reminds me of that saying where your environment is a reflective of your psyche and your mind. So if your environment is cluttered and it's messy, then your mind is probably in a similar state and you can affect one or the other accordingly. And you also mentioned there about some of this starting within childhood. And you know, in between childhood and adulthood there's a lot of things that can stifle creativity or can limit it or can boost it, and that's why I wanted to know about certain influences from your upbringing that helped boost and strengthen or, you know, sustain that creativity as you were growing.

Dr Jana Rieger : 5:33

Yeah, I think that it really came down to the role models I had around me. So, again, we weren't necessarily a family. So I have five siblings there's six of us and we had music as a creative outlet in our family. But where I think creativity was really influential for me was my father and watching him, so having that role model of somebody who was creative with his life. So he was doing a certain job and he decided he's going to get into the entrepreneurial world and do it for himself. So I watched him do that and go through it and I think that was really important.

Dr Jana Rieger : 6:13

I think the other thing that was really important was being in that family with five siblings.

Dr Jana Rieger : 6:19

None of us were alike and our parents never said alike and our parents never said oh, you know, we want you to do this, you have to go down this route. So it was kind of like open and so I could also watch my older siblings and kind of see how life was moving them. So I think that was really important. And I think the other thing that was super important that you know I kind of feel sad for kids nowadays but we were told to go play, like get out of the house and go play and you know we'd be gone until it was time for supper in the summertime, right. And I think you know you had to be creative to make life fun. Like you had to come up with stuff. You weren't necessarily being fed a diet of things and I think that was a real benefit for the generation that I grew up in, and sometimes I feel a little sad for kids now that they don't have that freedom to just take off and go explore the world as much as we did anyhow.

Lendo: 7:20

Would that be, in a sense, your advice for parents to nurture creativity within their children as well, finding ways to just get them back to going out there and let them figure it out, create the tools that they're going to play with, or go find them. Or, yeah, what would be your advice for parents trying to sustain or nurture that creative aspect for their children?

Dr Jana Rieger : 7:45

Yeah, I think just from my own experience, I think the one thing that was really important in nurturing creativity was knowing that it was okay to fail. The whole risk-taking thing was something that again, watching my dad step out, take a risk, do something different, create a whole new business, and you know it could have failed and it went marvelously well. But that's not always the case. And so I think just knowing that and having that sense that also not everybody's going to love what you create, 50% of the people might love it, they might love the book you write and the other 50% might not, and that's okay too. So I think that would be some advice that I would have instilling that knowledge that it's better to at least try instead of being scared to try. It's like that. Teddy Roosevelt wrote that in one of his speeches, that man in the arena speech where he talks about. You know, good for the guy who got out there, jason might be dirty and bloody, but at least he tried. You know it was a valiant effort, yeah absolutely.

Lendo: 8:55

What your dad did there for you was quite exceptional because it showed you that it was safe. It was okay to try and fail, and particularly thinking of the academic pathway, that's usually the safe route and the create your own business route, that's the risky route. You're borderline, a gambler, you've got to be careful. But you're literally going into this space and creating the infrastructure rather than have it be created for you. And that's where I think again, it's phenomenal that you're able to have that model for you, because you jumped into one thing and then, from there, jumped into another thing and another thing. But that instinct to jump into things, I mean same way that you, a year ahead of yourself. You have all this free time. What am I going to do with this? An idea comes up and boom, you run with it.

Dr Jana Rieger : 9:49

Next thing, you know you're a novelist, yeah, and you know, lando, it's really interesting that you bring that up, because my mom was very conservative and the message that she gave me was always get a job that's always going to support you and, you know, pay for whatever you need in life. So it was a very conservative approach, which obviously I listened to. Going in that academic route, my father never really said you should do this or that. He led more by example. So I think I had this blend of fear-based choices about what to do in your life. And then here's this other side of things, and you know, within academia there was definitely, you know there were parts that prepared me for entrepreneurship.

Dr Jana Rieger : 10:34

So I started a lab. I had to figure out how to get money in that lab, how to support the people that I needed to be in it, so sometimes you felt like an entrepreneur who had no profit in their business. You just started scraping around to find that to keep things going. And what really pushed me into the entrepreneurial side was I got bored. So it's that whole creativity thing again For a while, while I was creating in the lab, setting it up, doing the research, again For a while, while I was creating in the lab, setting it up, doing the research, writing the papers, doing the presentations, like getting to all those places, was something interesting for me. When it became like repetitive I started thinking, okay, I need something different here. And I think that was my first step out into the creative world with the novel writing, when I had that moment kind of satisfied that. But ultimately what really got me into that again, that more creative feeling like I'm in my flow, was the business and spinning out the stuff from the university, the business from the university.

Lendo: 11:41

And so when you created your first device there, which, if I understood correctly, is to help people who suffer from dysphagia, difficulty swallowing, from stroke or other debilitating conditions, were you submerged in an environment long enough where you started seeing certain problems and your mind just started wandering towards okay, like well, can we do something about this? And now you're starting to build it within your mind before you even bring it just from being in the field. We're already kind of going through the journey, if you can take us through coming up with our first innovation within the transitions.

Dr Jana Rieger : 12:15

Yeah, yeah for sure. So it really was around practicality, I guess. In some ways I was working with patients who had head and neck cancer, so they'd been through this trauma. They were left with this terrible condition where it was life-threatening that they couldn't eat. I knew that we had this exercise program that could help them get better, but I had this huge machine in my lab which made it really impractical for them to come in every day. So I had this frustration, and so did they. But I also had some really great people around me. So we had an interdisciplinary team.

Dr Jana Rieger : 12:54

We had engineers who worked at that particular institute, and I had a young person in my lab who was, I would say, more techie than I was in terms of like, hey, these wearables are just coming out Fitbit, hey, what's? This thing Sounds pretty cool. Why couldn't we do this? So the question was posed and then it was like, yeah, that is really interesting, and then it just started snowballing. The one thing that really made it happen was you needed money to make it happen, and so I was fortunate. I applied for funding from the Alberta Cancer Foundation and they gave me quite a substantial grant to develop this, and the promise in that was that we would definitely take this to commercialization. So get it out of the lab, just not have it be something that was sitting in the lab. And I felt very strongly about that and it's a thing I did because it was definitely that push Again.

Dr Jana Rieger : 13:53

I did come up to a wall of fear when it was like, okay, I know the academic thing and I know it really well. I'm horribly bored, I'm scared to death of diving into this entrepreneurial world because I really don't know very much about it but I've always wanted to. So, confession after every degree that I did, I was like I think I should have done a degree in business, Like I really want to get into business. So this was my chance and I got some good mentors around and, long story short, we got the product out onto the market and eventually that led to the second product breath, where we were looking for ways to build on what we had done, get some creativity going again in terms of innovation within the team, and we were dealing with people who had severe anxiety, because if you think about eating and that you have the potential of choking on every bite of food like life-threatening, every day is a scary thing.

Dr Jana Rieger : 14:55

Survival. It's scary, so there's anxiety. There was a lot of issues with their lungs, because part of the issue is the food's going into their lungs rather than into the stomach. And I did my PhD. I had done in the area of breathing and breathing mechanics and how we interface with technology there. So it kind of came full circle and the move into doing a wearable for breathwork just seemed like the right thing to do.

Lendo: 15:24

The component of anxiety. I didn't understand how debilitating it was and to what degree it affected people, but it's really serious and I know that one of the lines of treatment with people who have anxiety there's like opiates and chemical interventions that we have. But can this help in some of those cases, this technology here? Because I was wondering what is the range of conditions that it can help people with who are suffering from anxiety, whether it's coming from okay they have difficulty swallowing and they're experiencing anxiety through that or they're having challenges coping with life, or they're suffering from other conditions and it's coming back to the anxiety component.

Dr Jana Rieger : 16:02

Yeah. So I think there's. It really depends, but what we do know is that the research behind breathwork and its effect on anxiety in a positive direction is really quite strong and comes out of really good institutions like Oxford and Stanford, and you know so it's first rate research that's been done around breathwork and anxiety. So maybe, if I just back up a little bit and talk about what is breathing and then breathwork because how does that connection come together? Absolutely, in fact, when we started developing breath and I started digging into the literature around anxiety more and more, I was like, oh my gosh, this is massive and it is something that we need in our society. So I'd say, with respect to breathing, there's a few misconceptions that people have and things that we hear on a regular basis. So one of them is like I breathe all the time, so do I need to do breathing exercises? Like, how does that help?

Dr Jana Rieger : 17:07

One thing about how we breathe is that, yes, we're breathing for life and sustaining our lives, obviously or we wouldn't be here having this conversation right now, lando but we don't use that system in a conscious way to take advantage of all the benefits that are associated with it and we end up becoming very unaware of our breathing and don't realize how much we are holding our breath or getting into shallow breathing. So, for example, when I was doing my PhD research, I was looking at how people interacted with speech recognition, which is basically another word for Siri on your phone. That's speech recognition. Or you know, you call up the bank and you're trying to say what you want on the automated thing and it's not understanding you and you get mad and you start like yelling at the phone because it's not understanding. So for my PhD, this was I had recognized that these systems were new, they were on computers and people were getting into really strange patterns with their computers because they were waiting for a response. They tended to get mad at what was happening and so they were breathing a lot about five times as much to say the same thing versus if they were just talking to somebody saying the same thing and they tended to move from like a more balanced breathing from your chest and your abdomen. You move from like a more balanced breathing from your chest and your abdomen, like there's kind of two parts to it, to coming up into the chest only, which sometimes can be associated with really shallow breathing. So when we're doing that, what ends up happening is you can trigger this fight or flight response in your body, so you're kind of always on high alert. If you think about when you get an email and maybe you see who it's from and you're probably holding your breath while you're reading it. That's what some of the research shows that we're anticipating something, so we're holding our breath, so we have so much stuff coming at us that keeps us in this potential fight or flight state.

Dr Jana Rieger : 19:25

We're talking about our nervous system. So this automatic system that we usually aren't very conscious of is called the autonomic system. So the one side of it is like prepare us for battle, right, the tiger comes out of the jungle and we have to either fight it or run. So all these hormones start shooting in our body and it gets the job done. But it also gets us in this high anxiety mode. What happens when we don't get out of that? Because the tiger is gone? But if we're living in a state now where we have all these little stressors constantly coming at us, we can stay in that really high state of anxiety and have all these stress hormones pumping, like cortisol pumping in our body.

Dr Jana Rieger : 20:15

So the other side of the system is what's called the rest and digest, or the parasympathetic part of the nervous system. Now that part of the nervous system can be triggered by deep breathing. So there's a nerve that runs in our body called the vagus, and when we get into deep breathing activities we stimulate that nerve and that side. So now we've got the balance coming in, saying, okay, calm down, it's all okay. So that's what breathwork really is in a nutshell is making breathing conscious and doing so in a way that can stimulate that side of your nervous system. That is the calming side of your nervous system and the calming side of your nervous system. And that's what the research shows. It shows that when people get into these breathwork techniques, they can reduce their blood pressure. Cortisol that stress hormone, is reduced good things like your anti-inflammatory markers. It has a positive effect on reducing inflammation. So, like, all these really positive things in the body can get triggered once you do this breathing intentionally.

Lendo: 21:37

So the Buddhists and the monks were right.

Dr Jana Rieger : 21:39

They were so right, and you know, the funny thing is that, I mean, 10,000 years can't be wrong. But in the West and this is okay too we are a culture that very often requires evidence and scientific evidence to back up these ancient wisdom traditions that the Buddhists and the monks in the himalayas don't need, but in our culture we seem to need that, and I think that's what's so exciting about this time is there's just really a bunch of great research that's coming out to show there truly are this isn't bunk there truly are these great effects on the body from doing intentional breathing.

Lendo: 22:30

I wanted this question to be or one of my first questions was relating to this directly where it's like why is breathing important, or what more is there to breathing than just? But it's actually fascinating where you can take it from an involuntary mechanism to a voluntary mechanism. I mean, of course there's expression like stop, take a deep breath and then go in or just breathe, breathe. You know we take people through breathing exercises even. I mean I was talking about chemical interventions, but before that, somebody who's having a panic attack. You want to, like, lower your voice. You know your posture. We're doing all of these things because we're just even trying I even try sometimes to get them to sync their breathing with my breathing right, if you give in to their anxiety, you're going to find your breathing rate also increase. It is fascinating to think that we can actually regulate our fight or flight or rest and digest system just from the breathing itself. That is really fascinating. So I guess, to answer my own question earlier, this is really for everyone. Like this can help everyone really.

Dr Jana Rieger : 23:32

Absolutely, absolutely, and I think that if you're someone who wants to deal with anxiety, it can help. If you're an athlete who wants to improve your heart rate variability, are an athlete who wants to improve your heart rate variability, so how you recover from your exercise, the oxygenation to your muscles, the clearing of lactic acid, this is something for you as well. So it really does span so many different areas of life. Attention and focus You're getting more blood to your brain. So the studies that have looked at attention and focus You're getting more blood to your brain. So the studies that have looked at attention and focus and memory are showing positive outcomes. So definitely, across the board, a healthy behavior.

Lendo: 24:17

When it comes to like breathing exercise themselves, they're very hard because the mind wanders. And shouldn't the exercise itself calm the mind down? Because I've never been able to sit there and meditate. I've never been able to sit there and confession here, go through a full prayer without my mind just pew within the first couple of seconds.

Dr Jana Rieger : 24:40

We don't tell anyone, Lando.

Lendo: 24:43

Yeah, I know you listen to us, but what's my challenge? Why is it that if I'm working through breathing exercises, my mind is still gone. It's still hard for me to remain anchored in what I'm doing if it's calming me down and engaging my parasympathetic nervous system and like what's going on there.

Dr Jana Rieger : 25:01

If I may ask, yeah, I think there's a few layers there in terms of potentially what could be going on. So the one thing that we've heard when we're talking about breathwork again, I think it's another misconception is oh, I'm not into meditation and it's like in my mind anyhow they're related, but separate, right. They're related, but separate, right. So I'm like you if I try to meditate and I'm not in any kind of calm state, no matter how much I sit there and try to tell myself to do it, my mind's like racing. I get maybe if you had 30 seconds, you know you can start it with the best intention and you then exhaling for six seconds, so you get a cycle of about six breaths per minute. And that is kind of like the golden breathwork exercise that's been used in lots of studies, especially the ones that show benefits for anxiety reduction. So you know you can start that and you've got. You start counting five seconds in, five seconds out. Maybe you're watching an app on your phone, you're trying to stick with it and before you know it, you're again off somewhere, and not necessarily into the breathing exercise. Never mind, we'll just leave meditation off to the side for now. But you're even not present in that breathing exercise. And that's what I love about what we've developed with breath, because what the wearable does is it brings in this vibration to the chest and there's something about having something else that is a stimulus, take you there and get you out of your head. And so it's really for me that has really changed the whole practice of breath work, and I don't think about time anymore because you can set time on it, and I don't think about counting, because you can set how long you want your inhales and exhales. So I'm not trying to do a product plug here, but I'm just saying how important that was for me in being able to focus somewhere else, like feeling my focus somewhere else. It also is something I think that you want to build up to.

Dr Jana Rieger : 27:44

So it's like any behavior change. You know January 1st comes. We have all these huge New Year's resolutions that are probably way too aggressive. Let's just say and I think the same thing for any new behavior that you try we know from the research that even just five minutes of breath work a day, like dedicated time, is enough to make a difference, and so I think getting people over that hump of thinking, oh, my God, I have to do, I have to sit down for half an hour and just like, try to calm my mind is going to be hard. So you know, starting small, and what I find now is I'll set it for you know, day is starting. I'm like, okay, listen, I'll get my five minutes in before I sit down at my desk and it's like boom, five minutes is done. I'm like, whoa, that went too fast.

Lendo: 28:38

I want another five minutes, it's like the snooze button Right Totally.

Dr Jana Rieger : 28:40

Oh, that's a great way. I've talked about that before but that's a great way to do it. So that's what's been very helpful for me. And then again, it didn't happen like right away either in terms of the feeling of calm. You know that few weeks to actually be like, wow, okay, I'm not having that anxiety like I did before, I haven't woken up with a panic attack for wow, didn't notice, but that's just not happening anymore either. And then when I have that baseline, that good foundation of having a nervous system that is calm, it's so much easier for me anyhow Again, this is all my own perspective it's so much easier to sit and be meditative okay because I'm calm, so I'm not saying I'm perfect at that.

Dr Jana Rieger : 29:39

And then, you know, the thoughts come, but it's easier for them to come and go and not for me to get into that fear-based reaction of a thought that comes into my head that I need to start thinking about it and being like thinking, oh, what am I going to do and how is this going to work, and which would be that fight or flight kind of thing kicking in. It's much easier to be like okay, there's a thought and it's just now is my time, I'm letting it float through. So that's been my experience with having that baseline.

Lendo: 30:11

No, that's amazing. It made me think so with our response to stressful stimuli. We have the immediate response to stress, but you also have the long-term response to stress and kind of like what we're talking about here just earlier. If you think of all the stress we'll call them like stress points that you bump into throughout the course of a day. When do you really get a chance to bring it back down? When do you really get a chance to it? Almost it's like a just like a buildup to a point of climax and then, once you're like rah, that's when you're like okay, maybe I should calm down. And that could be you yelling at somebody on the road or you know, like thinking they can hear you, or it could be you saying something. Either way, the way it comes out, but there's something about that perpetual stress response, that ongoing stress response, and being able to do something about that. That is really difficult.

Dr Jana Rieger : 31:06

Yeah.

Lendo: 31:06

Even with the release of chemicals in our body, like it goes on for very length, and that was probably one of the scariest things that I learned about stress and it's just a long-term response to it, and so, yeah, like I can see how it's very helpful. I mean, we've been touching on this too, but did you have to do a little bit of research into what makes people stick to healthy behaviors? Or I mean, we mentioned Fitbit earlier, but, like, why is it so hard for us to stick to these healthier behavior, to change our ways?

Dr Jana Rieger : 31:38

Yeah, for sure, because I mean, that was something even with our first product. People were taking this wearable home with them to do these exercises that were measuring what their muscles were doing, and we learned a lot from that in terms of what made people stick to behaviors. And we knew that what we saw with them was that having a wearable really could improve how much they stuck to the exercise that they were supposed to do. But there's a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear and he has four principles in there, that kind of help with sticking to healthy behaviors. So one of them is making it obvious and that's one thing that we heard from patients was that by having the wearable sitting on their counter, in their kitchen counter, wherever it was, it was like, oh, I need to do my exercises, so I do the same thing with breath. I have it sitting beside my bed. It's a reminder before I go to sleep that, oh hey, I got to get my time in or I'll take it to the office with me, put it on my desk. And again, it's just making it obvious.

Dr Jana Rieger : 32:49

It has to be attractive for us to want to stick to a behavior. So for me, you know, the idea that I can reduce my stress without having to take any kind of pharmaceutical or something like that. That's really attractive to me. You have to make it easy, so something that is easy to stick to.

Dr Jana Rieger : 33:10

So again, with the product for the medical product that we created as well as breasts been made so that, just you know, open up, the app touched on earlier was to make it somehow satisfying and for me, having that tactile, the vibration, the vibrotactile vibration really creates an immersive experience that I look forward to. So for me, that's what does it with breath. I know for some folks who were using our other product, what was satisfying for them was seeing how many targets they hit. So we can have these internal or external frames of references. But I think those are some keys in helping to establish these habits and again, making them small and achievable on a daily basis. You know, we didn't get stressed out overnight. We got stressed out over years of little stuff, little stuff, maybe a big thing, more little stuff, little stuff, and so we can't expect that we can just erase that in one go. It's again creating this nice foundation for us to function on.

Lendo: 34:36

So, let's say, for people who have anxiety to the degree where they may be hospitalized as a result of it, will the thinking be okay if they're engaging in such practices on a regular or even just, let's say, in their lives whenever they're having these panic attacks? It actually helps them because they're already doing the work, they're already laying down the foundation. It's not like their fight or flight has been engaged. The long-term stress response has been engaged and now they're dealing with a stressful situation. No, it's more like okay, you've been calming your system, doing breathing exercises maybe, and when that stressful event hit, you're able to tackle that a little bit differently.

Dr Jana Rieger : 35:18

Yeah, I mean I feel like now I'm stepping out of my area of expertise. I know that there are studies that have looked at clinically diagnosed anxiety and does breathwork work for that population as well as just general anxiety, and definitely there is research to show that it does in terms of like how that needs to be blended with other treatments. I just don't feel like I have enough background there to comment specifically on it enough background there to comment specifically on it.

Lendo: 35:52

Can you tell us more about breathwork itself, because, for example, I think I was reading there on your website that it was box breathing that came from the military, for example. Can you tell us more about some of these breathwork techniques?

Dr Jana Rieger : 36:05

For sure. So a lot of them have components. Number one, that slow down your breathing. So that's kind of that's a basic and that's again part of that whole resetting the vagus nerve and like getting the system calm. So at the very base there's that diaphragmatic or deep, slow breathing. Then some of these other ones, like box breathing, insert things like pauses. So for box breathing you breathe in for a certain number of seconds, you hold your breath for that many seconds, you breathe out for that many seconds and then you breathe or you hold your breath for that many seconds and you keep doing that.

Dr Jana Rieger : 36:47

So the thinking around holding your breath is related to the carbon dioxide, oxygen blend in your blood and when we are holding our breath carbon dioxide tends to increase. Now I was, you know, when you hear carbon dioxide you think yeah, man, you don't want too much of that. You know that can't be good, but you do need the right amount in your blood and the best. I believe it was James Nestor who wrote the book. Breathe was like the divorce lawyer on the blood cells. So basically it kicks off oxygen and if you don't have carbon dioxide on enough on your red blood cells, the oxygen isn't going to get booted off and you need to boot it off so that it goes to your muscles and wherever else it needs to go to. So the thinking behind the breath holding is related to that balance and then that relates to your focus. So the box breathing being used by people who are in the military, you know there's studies about reaction time with box breathing, actually impulse control with box breathing, shooter drills with box breathing and showing that attention, reaction time thing is affected by it.

Dr Jana Rieger : 38:19

There are other techniques of breathwork where there is a prolonged exhalation. Essentially that relates to taking advantage of the vagus nerve as much as possible. So when you prolong your exhalations there's a bit more stimulation that happens to that nerve. So again it promotes more of that rest and digest. So any exercises that we've put into the program, into the breath program, we've really looked to see what is the basis for what's the evidence for this and trying to keep it basic. I mean there are other more complicated breathwork exercises out there where we wouldn't want to step into that territory. You know they're ones that really you should be with a breathwork coach. A lot of those are hyperventilation type of techniques where I think that it's those kind of things are best to do for a specific reason, with somebody who can monitor what you're doing.

Lendo: 39:26

So Kind of similarly, there is the vibrations, integrating vibrations within that technology. Were there interesting things that you stumbled upon? Or do you have to go back and learn more about vibration Because my phone vibrating in my pocket borderline annoying, for me at least. I'm like I need to like shut that down. Um, but like we've been kind of like even actually like video games use vibrations with controllers to submerge you a little bit more into the experience of it, and so can you tell us more about some of the things that you guys that led you guys to integrate vibration, or some of the things that you find interesting about that?

Dr Jana Rieger : 40:06

I think you know it comes a bit from our background on the team. The institute that we worked in was really progressive and we were doing computer simulation long before other people were. We were using 3D printing and as part of the simulation we used haptic devices. So that was like you got force feedback based on what you were seeing on the computer screen. So it's kind of a little bit of that history in terms of how we could deliver feedback to a body about what we wanted the body to do. So that was the base for where this came from.

Dr Jana Rieger : 40:47

But when we started to look into vibration, there's some really fun, great research that is starting to come out around that as well, and it depends on the frequency of vibration that you're delivering. But they're anticipating that there could be health benefits related to this. So one of the most recent studies was a mouse. Study came out of MIT where they took mice that had been altered genetically to be predisposed to Alzheimer's and they took half those mice and they put them for an hour on a speaker that vibrated at 45 hertz and the other mice didn't get it. They just were in the same room but they didn't get the vibration and what they found was that the mice who got vibration did not develop plaques in their brain. There's speculation that there could be neuroprotective effects around vibration, so it could prevent some of the things that are associated with Alzheimer's. Now these are animal studies, so you can't say whoa, here's the cure for Alzheimer's right now. But I mean the indication is that there's something behind this that we need to look at. Reaction time when people have a wearable that's vibrating, reaction times get better. So again, for us it came from a way that we knew could tell the body what you wanted to do.

Dr Jana Rieger : 42:24

But the research that's emerging and we do use that gamma range of vibration in the device the research that's emerging around that, around gamma brainwaves, around coherence, like how you get things moving in the same direction, essentially, is really fascinating.

Dr Jana Rieger : 42:44

And so I think that, while it's coming out of great institutions and it's starting to enter the mainstream literature, it's still early days, but I think there's going to be something novel and very interesting around how we use vibration for healing. There are some applications for the general public. For example, there are vagus nerve stimulators that will sit on the outside of the skin and vibrate in an effort to stimulate that vagus nerve. So, remember I said, it starts in the brain and it goes all through the body, it wanders everywhere and they're taking advantage with that vibration there to stimulate that nerve and get that rest and digest thing happening. I think that some, also with respect to the general public, some whole body vibration research, especially in the physiotherapy musculoskeletal areas, is definitely showing that there are some benefits, and so you may have seen whole body vibration exercise equipment where you're standing on a vibrating platform.

Lendo: 43:56

Yes, actually.

Dr Jana Rieger : 43:58

And so it kind of has crossed from research, early research, into coming out into the mainstream for consumer purchase essentially, yeah, even with my chiropractor I've been going, so I should have thought of this sooner.

Lendo: 44:13

but they use vibrations to stimulate blood flow and I was asking her about the device and it was along the same principles there. So definitely starting to kind of like leak out to the general public there.

Dr Jana Rieger : 44:24

Yeah.

Lendo: 44:25

There's this question that we had here and I think we kind of touched on it, but I just wanted to know if there's more that could be said about it. But is there a difference between how our bodies and minds process and manage stress and are the two distinct mechanism? I play here and it's kind of interesting because again you're talking about the vibration device to stimulate the vagus nerve or the breathing exercise itself and like where are we stimulating the pathway to initiate a certain response from right?

Dr Jana Rieger : 44:52

yeah, and where is the body and where is the mind in all of this, I mean? So it's a combination, really, of these things happen to us in our environment. They get this response going. Where it's this anxiety response, our body has to deal with it somehow and, depending on how we're set up, it will do what it needs to do. We can do things to affect that.

Dr Jana Rieger : 45:21

But there's this whole other theory called polyvagal theory. So again, it's about this vagus nerve and it's kind of like a relay center in the brain where this all comes together, where not only our heart regulation and our breathing regulation go through there, but other things. Like we're looking at facial signs for like, is this a safe environment? Am I okay here? We're listening, we're speaking, we're feeling things, and so all those things come into this feedback loop of yes, you're okay, this is all right, we can just all calm down here. Versus in that feedback loop going, whether it's for real or not, or imagined, it's like, no, you aren't okay, like this is we, you have to get out of here, and then it's kind of like, okay, so that's in the brain and it's like stimulating all this. But then there's this higher level, this mind level of like, what are our thoughts and what are our beliefs and how did those get filtered down onto our body? Those get filtered down onto our body and you know, I was listening to Joe Dispenza.

Dr Jana Rieger : 46:32

Dr Joe Dispenza talk about this whole thing of thinking right. So you have the anxious thought, the fear-based thought, and you think about it, and then you think about it some more and you think about it some more and now you're creating this path throughout your body and in your brain. Like it's like Pac-Man created this thing and you are. It's getting so common, your body is getting so good at knowing that fear-based response that it is now from anxiety. It's going to go into panic and it's going to do it on its own because you've taught it really well Fear, fear, fear, fear.

Dr Jana Rieger : 47:12

And then you wake up with panic and it shouldn't be surprising because you've set your, you've thought those thoughts, real or not, and it's not your brain, it's your mind that is putting the thoughts there and he talked about you know, if you can switch that and like have these love-based thoughts, like these positive-based thoughts, then you have instead of panic attack. He called it a love attack, but to his point I get it. You need to be able to have, as we talked about before, that open, calm space to be able to have that kind of thinking to get you out of that loop. And so where the body ends, the mind begins. That is a big question, lendo. If you can tell me, that'd be awesome. But they're so intricately related and you know our thoughts, the way we think, we create. In many ways we create our realities around us, whether that's positive or negative, whether that's positive or negative.

Lendo: 48:15

So yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of Dr Sapolsky talking about how we're one of the only species or one of those. Something particular about us is how we can drive ourselves in a complete state of anxiety just thinking about how our team won or lost, right Like, oh, totally.

Dr Jana Rieger : 48:36

Yeah it's won or lost, Right. Like, oh, totally, yeah, it's a. And how attached we get to our thoughts, like how attached are we to our team winning? Yeah, if that affects us for a week, versus like you're at the game and it's kind of sad but you move on right away. That's a mind thing, creating a thought thing, creating a body response.

Lendo: 48:58

The other thing that I didn't I wasn't too familiar with is the heart-brain coherence, Maybe it's a similar loop where we don't know where one begins where one starts. But what are we starting to discover about how these two systems influence each other beyond what we used to think of their relationship?

Dr Jana Rieger : 49:16

This gets kind of trippy, because they found that the heart actually has its own set of neurons, so it's kind of like its own little brain. And your brain emits electromagnetic frequencies and so does your heart, and that's why you can go get an electrocardiogram and they can tell what your heart's doing. And you can get an electroencephalogram and they can tell what your heart's doing. And you can get an electroencephalogram and they can tell what your brain is doing. So if we're in a, basically functioning, and at an, I'll call it unconscious, even though you're conscious but you're not very aware, you know we're functioning in these places of stress, and so when we do that, a lot of times we're very incoherent, and by that I mean your heart's doing one thing, your breathing system's doing another thing and your brain's doing something else. And all those waves, if you look at them they look super messy. The golden rule of breathing, the deep breathing. So about that, six-second cycle in, six-second cycle out.

Dr Jana Rieger : 50:20

What they have realized is that all of a sudden, everything starts sinking. So your breathing starts sinking with your heart and the heart starts sinking with the brain. So you start getting, instead of these brainwaves, really active, noisy. You start getting some nice brainwaves. They're higher frequency but they're still more periodic and in a regular pattern. And so it's this whole thing of things moving in motion, like when you're in the same vibratory frequency, you're able to get into the same motion.

Dr Jana Rieger : 50:59

And what they find when you can get into that state is you have a whole lot more focus, your mind is more open out up in the caves. Let them measure their brainwaves when they were in these states. They were in these higher brainwave states when they were meditating, so like this gamma range and even super gamma, and there's like a bunch of other ranges that they've actually found. So that's what's behind that heart brain coherence, like let's get ourselves into this place where we are more open, we're more intuitive. Maybe that's where creativity starts, bringing it right back to the very beginning. Here, you know, you open your mind and again, it's that space where you're not doing the regular thinking of the day, you have a different brainwave happening and you're open to creative inspiration.

Lendo: 52:01

Everything we're talking about just brings me back to the importance of stopping during the day. You know the benefits of that and how we don't take advantage of that enough, because, especially as parents, students, you're in a go mode, right Like everything is made so you can be able to move efficiently, fluently, as fast as you can from one thing to another. And just that ability to be able to shut down is so lacking if we're not conscious of it.

Dr Jana Rieger : 52:27

It is. And the other thing that this is just from my perspective, and what I know I would do is, if there's something in my life that is like deep down bothering me and I don't want to think about it, I get into avoidance behaviors, and I think a lot of us do this to avoid that feeling of whether it's a fear or a stress. So that might be. We overwork, maybe we over scroll, we do scroll for hours. We watch Netflix, we do anything but create that open, quiet space for ourselves, because that's where you have to. You know, that's sometimes where the brain starts going as well, but with the things that you don't want to look at. So I mean, that's a whole other conversation that you don't want to look at. So I mean, that's a whole other conversation. But I think that, instead of what I have found for myself, anyhow, is, instead of moving into those avoidance behaviors, like you said, just slow down, take a break, slow down, replace it with something your, you know, your five minutes or 10 minutes of breath work instead.

Lendo: 53:38

Yeah there's something there too.

Dr Jana Rieger : 53:39

My famous line is I need to distract my brain, but then I just engage into something that engages my brain differently yeah, totally, and it feels good because you don't have to think about that stuff that's like kind of grinding on you yeah but I think too, you know, from a perspective of I just thought of this with respect to kids, whether they're young, pre-teens, teens it's never too early to teach them about this and to get them to start this as a healthy behavior, just as a routine behavior, and I think that a lot of kids, especially in the West, have never been brought up with this kind of thinking or these kind of practices, and I think when they do, there's some real benefits. Again, research shows that having a course of breathwork can improve math skills and it can have lasting effects, and so it's whatever it's doing with kids, focusing their attention, just allowing them to relax so that they're open to learning. It's not too young to teach kids how to do breathwork.

Lendo: 54:52

You're not one I was trying to figure where I could plug that question in, because are there any other additional practical advice that you can give on how to like actually get them to engage in some of these activities? I know some teachers do meditation one of my friends, she, does meditations with their young students. And then I mean there's this also, this commercial that keeps coming up on youtube where it's like hey, vaping actually gives you more anxiety. Smoking, aka smoking, increases your levels of anxiety. When people are smoking and engaging those behaviors specifically to decrease their anxiety, but they're not really doing it in the long run and with that I was thinking it's particularly important because, again, things like vaping are becoming so prevalent in society. But maybe it's just people lacking outlets to deal with stress and to get themselves grounded again. Are there more strategies or techniques or ways we can get young people into breath work, these kind of exercises?

Dr Jana Rieger : 55:50

Yeah, I think you know from some of the, especially the preteen teens that we've heard who are using the breast product. They like it, they like that feeling like it's more immersive to them. Again, it keeps them focused on doing that for five minutes. So if the kids are kids who like tech, which a lot of kids do, that might be something. Again, I think it's what do we show them as adults, like, how are we modeling that behavior to them?

Dr Jana Rieger : 56:20

Can we get them to do it when they first wake up, or is it too much of a rush to get out of the house? If it is, then what's the best time where you could just work it in for even five minutes in a day? And I know a lot of schools are starting to minutes in a day and I know a lot of schools are starting to incorporate this into their curriculum and I think that maybe a lot of teachers don't necessarily feel comfortable with thinking that they have to teach breathwork. I think it can be made so simple in terms of even just deep, slow breathing, starting a class off, doing it for five minutes, just to kind of get that habit built into the kids about doing this.

Lendo: 57:06

Yeah, I think they should carry that in ambulances or hospitals period Just help people calm down. There's this. There's the other question that I had and I don't know if I can use the term paradox for it, but to me it seems like a paradox. When the need to stay calm when you are unnerved, is that a paradox a little bit.

Dr Jana Rieger : 57:29

It is. It really is, and I think you know some of the best examples of it come from back to the military and box breathing. Like they're in situations where the best of us would become unnerved. And maybe there's something about them, those people who go into that aspect of life that allows them to be more calm. But there is a reason why they're taught this breathing because of the effect that it has on the system and it happens to the best of us.

Dr Jana Rieger : 58:05

If we're going to do a presentation in front of people. It's like, yeah, freaking out. I know I'm supposed to be calm, so I think it's again, easier to get there when you already have the baseline easier to get there when you already have the baseline. So there was a great quote from Dr Brown about breathwork so he's a specialist in this area and he said that waiting for the anxious moment to do breathwork is like brushing your teeth once they've all fallen out, like it's kind of like it's too late, like you need to be keeping this up as part of your health hygiene, essentially, so that when you do get into those situations where it feels like a paradox, I'm supposed to be calm but I'm nervous that you can handle those.

Lendo: 58:52

I don't know if that answered your question, mundo, but Not only does it answer my question, but it also answers the previous question, which was about when you encounter for people with, like, more serious anxiety disorders, whenever they encounter those situations. Well, if they've already been engaging in these practices, maybe it's going to help alleviate the degree to which that a particular event can be, and for some people they do need more serious interventions. But I can see where it helps and I think your answer also alluded to that in some capacities. So, yeah, I was going to ask you about, like are you concerned over the prevalence of anxiety in society today, or do you feel like we're, like are we getting a better hang of it? Or at least even just like like addressing it to some degree? Or like what are your thoughts when it comes to that?

Dr Jana Rieger : 59:41

I think that we are having more open conversations about it, which is good, right. So now at least people can talk about it and it's not like that they also have to worry about hiding it, that they also have to worry about hiding it. But I am concerned. I'm concerned for this younger generation who is coming up. When I was a prof teaching at the university and I had, you know, a 20-year career doing that the students in this latter part of my career were very different from the students in the beginning and I saw a whole lot more anxiety. I saw a whole lot more. We had to make special accommodations for students and it was just different, and I think it's.

Dr Jana Rieger : 1:00:29

I do have a concern for the younger people, who are dealing with a lot of pressures that many of us who are somewhere around my generation didn't have to Like. We didn't have a constant barrage of information through social media. If you just look at what's happened over the past week in this world and like all the news that's like constantly being fed and you have to decide is this real or not, and you have email or text and people are expecting that you're gonna answer right away and like. So I think that you know kids are. They're feeling the brunt of this and maybe they don't have the same kind of outlets as well that we had as kids where we could just like, like I said, take off and go have some fun and detach from technology and stuff like that. So I do have a concern that we have a society that is at risk for dealing with some of these more anxious things in our world right now and having those in our face more than ever. I'm also concerned about the rate of prescriptions that are written and that being the go-to. I get it, it's fast, it's a pill Everybody likes when things happen quickly and changes happen quickly. But I think you know that's also a concern.

Dr Jana Rieger : 1:02:00

When there are, you know, potentially there could be pathways that wouldn't require pharmaceutical intervention, that those could be tried first, just with some knowledge around what those are and how they can be applied. So I do think it's something that we should be keeping our eyes on. But the other thing I was having a conversation yesterday with someone around business and the entrepreneurial world and how at one time, you know, if you even mentioned breath work or meditation, it'd be like what? That's weird, you know, kind of had these connotations of like oof, but now it's being brought into the workplace. So and again, there's some great research around that. When you know worker productivity keeping people stressed Most people are stressed at their jobs. 80% of people say that their jobs they feel stressed out. That's a lot of stressed out people. So I do think that we're at this time where there's some great things happening. There's more openness, and it's a good thing, because I think there's more reasons for people to be stressed out, just based on what's happening out there.

Lendo: 1:03:15

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I like how we're talking about it more because it opens a space for more opportunities to educate people.

Lendo: 1:03:23

But that's where also people got to get to the right information. And that's where I had that question in there of like are we having the right conversations with our doctor, where, for example, I've been able to have very mature conversations with my doctor about ADHD, just reading about it, researching, conversating with my peers, seeing how some of my peers who are not medicated are dealing with this versus those who are medicated or managing it, and I can't help but think that with more education and more information, people can have better conversation or even raise the right questions with their doctors. And you know it's like do people have enough information at hand to be able to raise the right question, have the right conversations with their doctors? What do you think about that point of communication?

Dr Jana Rieger : 1:04:11

No, that is also multi-layered, because do their doctors have enough time to understand what is the latest research and all of the research that's out there? What of it is good, what is what we've talked about before, bro, science, you know, and it's like what's real, what's not. So I think that what I love about information now is that it's more available to everybody, so you're not just in the dark. As a consumer of health and someone who goes to a doctor, you can be more educated when you go to the doctor, and I think there's some great resources out there. Again, the one that I really like is James Nestor's book Breathe. You know he spent 10 years researching and talking to experts in the field and really putting this together as an easy read for people around. What is it behind breathing that can help us? So I think that we have those mechanisms for us, but I think sometimes, too, it's the luck of who your doctor is.

Dr Jana Rieger : 1:05:27

So, personal story when I was in my first year of university, I had experienced a panic attack. I didn't know what this was. I was like, oh my God, I think I'm having a heart attack. I didn't know what this was. I was like, oh my God, I think I'm having a heart attack. Holy cow, what is this? No clue. Went to the doctor, told her like this is what happened. My heart was racing. I think I'm having a heart attack. What's going on? She's like oh, tana, it's just anxiety. You had a panic attack. I'm like, really, what is that? And so she told me and that was kind of the end of the story, she didn't suggest any kind of pharmaceutical or anything like that.

Dr Jana Rieger : 1:06:06

At the time I don't think that was as prevalent and I'm glad she didn't, because it never, you know, it happened. I was satisfied Okay, that's what it is, let it go. And it didn't happen again throughout my university career. So I think it kind of depends. You know how the lack of who your physician is as well in terms of like what their predisposition is, and, to open, give you options.

Lendo: 1:06:31

Essentially no, I'm sorry. Thank you for that response. We've covered a lot of ground with this conversation here. I'm really grateful for all the information that you took the time to come and share here with us. I think Ronnie's probably loving this right now, but yeah, it's been great. Yeah, there it goes. But if you can kind of like share with us some final words, perhaps what's next for you, and with true angle as well, if there's any excitement, development you'd like to share, even just where people can find your work and products yeah, for sure.

Dr Jana Rieger : 1:07:09

So we're developing other experiences to put into the app. So we have one part of it is breathwork and the other is just experiences where you can sit back, relax and enjoy that benefit of vibration. So whether it's a heartbeat or whatever it is to kind of get you into the zone and to chill out. So we're working on some of those so that users have more and more experiences. So I'd say that's what's really exciting on that stage of where we are with breath. So you can find us online at GetBreath, and breath is B-R-E-T-H. We had a young person who just did a science project with breath and someone told her that they spelt breath wrong. She spelt breath wrong.

Lendo: 1:07:55

It's like no, no, no.

Dr Jana Rieger : 1:07:59

So it's getbreathcom and, yeah, you can find us there and pick your color, okay, first different colors, amazing.

Lendo: 1:08:09

Well, again, we're eternally grateful to have had you on on the show. Thank you so much to our audience. We look forward to seeing you guys on the next one. I hope you on on the show. Thank you so much to our audience. We look forward to seeing you guys on the next one. I hope you guys enjoyed the show as much as we did and, yeah, thank you for your time as well.

Dr Jana Rieger : 1:08:24

Thanks, lando, it's been a pleasure.

Lendo: 1:08:26

Absolutely Okay, bye-bye. That was great yeah.