435. The 15-Minute Habit That Prevents Attorney Burnout with Leah Lagos

[MUSIC PLAYING] 15 minutes, twice a day will be something that changes your life. But you have to do it 100% for 10 weeks. That's Dr. Leah Lagos, internationally recognized clinical and performance psychologist for professional athletes, high performing executives, and CEOs. I can shift my heart rhythms to shift my emotional state, to shift my cognitive state, and so forth. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Michael Mogul, founder and CEO of Crisp, the nation's number one law from growth company. I've built my business through practice, not theory. Crisp started, which is $500 to my name, and has grown to over eight figures in revenue over the last few years, earning a spot on the ink 500 lists of the fastest growing private companies in America. Our approach has been to take everything we've learned about generating massive growth within our own organization and help the country's most ambitious and committed law firm owners do the same for theirs. In each episode of this podcast, I sit down with innovative market leaders from the legal industry and beyond to learn from those who thrive in the face of adversity, challenge the status quo, and define what it means to be a true game changer. I sat down with Dr. Lagos to discuss how increasing your heart rate variability, HRV, can improve your performance and judgment, how to identify which specific habits put your nervous system into a state of flow, and how to train your body to sense when it's off balance and self-correct to improve decision-making quality. You essentially developed the ability for the nervous system to sense when you're off balance, and the parasympathetic nervous system jumps in and says, hey, Michael, we've got to get back to baseline. And then we set you a lot faster. That's coming up on the Game Changing Attorney podcast. [MUSIC PLAYING] Before we begin today's episode, I want to remind you that we aren't beholden to any sponsors or run any ads on this podcast. This allows us to present all of our episodes raw and unfiltered. I'm not going to push any made-to-order meal services on you or try to save you any money on your car insurance. That being said, I have one small request. If you receive any value from this podcast, please give it a five-star review. Pay the fee so we can keep this podcast free. Look, welcome to the podcast. Hi, Michael. Good to see you. Yes, yes. I've been very excited for this. I've been looking forward to this for a long time, just to talk about everything in terms of HRV, biofeedback. This is near and dear to me just because I think one of the biggest habit shifts that I made in the past-- really, I think, less than six months has been integrating breathwork after having read your book. And obviously having met with you. And it's been absolutely transformational. So it's going to be very exciting to talk about some of this stuff. But to get started, if you could just give just a bit about your background, how did you get into just this world of HRV biofeedback? So I have been in the world of HRV biofeedback for two decades. And I had to stop saying the number because it just keeps getting longer and longer. But I do love it. And I'll tell you, my patience made it my specialty. It's in some ways. By virtue of how effective it was and life changing it was for them, and they kept sending me family and friends. And what started out in-- this is grad school from my dissertation and speaking to Paul Lear. And Paul Lear is at UMDNJ as a professor. He and two other professors, Afgani and Brawnia Vashilo, from Russia have found that one can create what's called resonance in the system. The most vivid way, Michael, I can explain it to you, is when you-- if you were to hit a glass that's just wood, the sound just stops. But if you gently tap a wine glass, it makes kind of a ping, a reverberating sound. And what they found was that everyone's autonomic nervous system can elicit that kind of reverberating frequency throughout the system that creates homeostasis. And it's a specific frequency that's a little bit different for everybody. It's generally between 5.5 and 6.5 rest per minute. And then what they have also found-- and they spent many research studies and years showing is that resonant frequency breathing, which is breathing at the specific rate that creates that reverberation throughout the system, then changes baseline heart rhythms after four weeks and can lead to an abundance of specific health effects, less anxiety, better mood, greater energy. So I came along as a senior graduate school and said, well, my specialty is performance psychology. I work with elite athletes, and particularly in golf. And can we use this for athletes, not just for health improvements, but to improve their performance? And they said, well, that's interesting. Let's research it. And little did I know that would be the next 20 years of my life. And what has started as a journey with athletes from the PGA toward to the NBA to the NFL has now transcended to the business world. They said, doc, we want you to do what you do with those athletes. But with us, to make decisions more effectively and consistently over time. And let's dig into HRV, just for people who aren't familiar. If they have a fitness tracker, if they have an or ring or a whoop or you can track their sleep, there's that metric like HRV, heart rate variability. And a lot of times, being using these trackers is an indicator of recovery. And the idea is like, what's a higher HRV? What's a lower HRV? I know a lot of entrepreneurs that are like, man, how do I get my HRV higher? Can you delve into what heart rate variability is and why it's important to have more variability versus less variability? Yes. So there are multiple ways to measure HRV. And also, these different wearables, which make HRV more accessible, measure them differently. So if you have an aura versus a whoop versus a garment, they may give you different measurements on the same period of time. So I put that in there. And I'll come back to it in just a minute. Heart rate variability is measuring essentially with every heart rate, there's a peak. You inhale and you exhale, and your heart rate goes up, and it goes down. And the peak of your heart rate and the time between the next peak becomes the metric. And we want more time between those peaks because it means what? It means the heart doesn't have to work as hard. So you have a bigger number. It means there's more time between what's called the RR intervals. And it's associated with greater health, predictive also of heart health, of less anxiety. It's associated with longevity. There's another way to measure heart rate variability. And it's more what I do in my office on a day-to-day with clients. So while clients will come in and say, I'm so stressed, my ororing says, I'm at an HIV of 18. And my wife, husband, sister, brother, they all have HIV's in the 40s to 50s. What's wrong with me? That is a different metric than the metric I'm going to explain now, which is, I call it peak to trough. The scientific word is resonance sinus arrhythmia. It's the inhale and exhale. And it actually, Michael, makes it much more tangible to understand, because you can see visually what these changes look like versus days where you didn't sleep. You had two glasses of wine. You're stressed about an upcoming XYZ. And those peak to troughs are minimized. And then that visual becomes very dynamic for someone. The numbers, if people want to use the numbers from aura or whoop or garment, this is what I would say. It's fun to talk about your HIV with someone else. But you can't compare your HIV range to someone else's HIV range. There's just many reasons, biological, height, skeletal vasculature. What you want to do is take a range of your HIV. If it's day, your nocturnal HIV every night for seven to 10 days. And Michael, you may have a range of 37 to 52 in that window. And what I say to clients is look for the top 25% of the range and what you're doing on those days that you're not doing on other days and repeat them. So the game becomes to be in your top quartile of HIV. And would you say that HIV is a pretty reliable indicator of just cognitive capacity and performance? Because there's other health metrics, resting heart rate, blood pressure, et cetera. How reliable is it when you wake up and you check your HIV and you say, OK, whether it's high or low, depending on what your range is, how reliable an indicator is that of cognitive capacity? You're seeing fantastic questions. It is an incredibly reliable metric that can be used to look at baseline health and wellness over time. But the way people are using it wrong is to say my HRV at 3 AM last night was XYZ and therefore my cognitive capacity at 10 AM after I've read the New York Times, spoken to my family, made sure my kids are at school and now I'm managing decisions with the partners in my law firm is going to be markedly different. One doesn't predict the other. So what I want to differentiate is that baseline HRV tracked over time is a wellness metric and it is scientific and reliable. If you have some strange variability, meaning your HRV drops significantly, you're getting numbers under 10 or around 10, there can be arbitrary reasons. Some people have hands that go cold at night and that will affect their readings. They're just not getting blood flow. Some people sleep on their hands and it doesn't mean they're unhealthy. It means they're short circuiting the blood flow. I've had clients who move their feet at night. They have just a little bit of like feet wiggles. I wouldn't call it trimmers. It's just that some people have that and their HRV is 85 on those nights and it's not an accurate reading. So I encourage people to look more at the patterns as opposed to day by day by day. - Yeah. And what about, I mean a lot of people listen to this podcast, their executives, they deal with a lot of stressful situations. Sometimes I've come across executives me being one of them for many years where you're just dealing with chronic stress. You can't say necessary that you're unhealthy. I guess people that exercise but they're just dealing with an immense amount of stress that's compounded over time and that tends to affect their HRV. So they might show up as a low-rate HRV and then by incorporating certain habits and practices they can raise it. How much does chronic stress play role? - Huge. It is a huge factor of what you see in your HRV and there are other variables and we can go through them. But HRV is a metric that reliably indicates the amount of stress your body is managing and whether you're giving your body, it's not just recovery. Recovery for some people implies like sitting down and sleeping, but helping your nervous system regulate to let go. And there's a host of ways from singing, I know that sounds funny. For some people singing, a list of it's very sympathetic activation. Other people numbers, a lot of attorneys. They can go to numbers to quiet their mind and put their nervous system in flow. Isn't that interesting? And it's not that they're trying, but they feel it. So anyway, I call it identifying your amplifiers and your decelerators and it's different for everybody. I see when I take my kids to school in the morning, my HRV is significantly higher until 1 p.m. It's just, it's the way my nervous system is circuited. But listen to those little idiosyncrasies and then repeat them and amplify them as much as possible. What are, I guess, some of the, just to get some of the tactical things, what are some of the things that tank HRV, like alcohol, right? Of course, and then what are some of the behaviors activities that can raise it? Sure. So some of the things that people don't think about as much alcohol is a known one and I will tell you for some people, it just decimates their HIV. I will look and I'll say you had alcohol last night, didn't you? Yes. And I'll say they are, I'm not trying to police you, but there are some people in this world that just aren't meant to have any alcohol. And there are other people that nervous system can handle a glass or two. And there's a third which has specific responses to specific types of alcohol. I had one client who jokingly said, whenever they had cheap wine, that's when their HRV tanked. But it's fun to understand through metrics that are scientific and reliable, who you are, and what puts your body in flow. We're on de-stellarators. Dehydration, not drinking enough water, not eating enough food. Oftentimes you have really high functioning, high producing, high net worth individuals who are forgetting to eat two meals a day or they subscribe to this idea that intermittent fasting as a lifestyle is good for them. I will tell you from years of seeing the world's HRV, it is not a long-term plan. It can have some short-term cognitive benefits, but from an HRV standpoint, I routinely see what I see with anorexics. And it is a compromised kind of locked system, the type of vigilant and just on edge internally. Other pieces that this is kind of an interesting one, connection. It's not the first place I go to when I see someone who has heart rate oscillations from a clinical level are below 10 beats. So what I mean by that is if your heart rate is 50, and on the inhale it goes up to 60 and back to 50, that's a little low. My players on the PGA tour, I'm not saying everyone has to have this. There's other reasons to with their physical endurance and workouts, but they're at 70. So the say their heart rate is 50, and on an inhale it goes up to 120 and back. So big changes, but oftentimes after we go through a list, are you sleeping, sleep deprivation? No, I'm not sleeping so well. Okay, is there something in your life that you're waiting for or your hypervigilant about and you don't turn off? Yes, so that leads to a conversation. Caffeine use, if you drink more and it might surprise you, it's more common than you think, more than 10 cups of coffee a day, you will see it in HIV. But nine cups is okay. I'm not endorsing nine either. Everyone's nervous system is different, but oftentimes when I've gone through the whole list of all the kind of idiosyncratic variables for lowering HIV and I get to coffee, it's 10 plus cups of coffee or double as restos that are four or five. And then the connection piece, it's really fascinating, but pay attention to who you spend time with and your heart rate variability at the end of the day. Our heart is a transcript of our experiences. It's not just the way we were majoring atically and our heart rhythms oftentimes show those experiences. So it's just something to note. And I've had people say that was really helpful for me to just have a reason to zone in on spending time with certain people and they have a metric to make a decision with. Yeah. And I wanted to tell them, maybe I should have done this earlier, but just really the upsides of making this a focus of actually aiming to improve your HIV, like the performance upside, because there's very real benefits to this in terms of just cognitive capacity, decision making, like just be able to make better decisions, like not burnout, emotional regulation, all these different factors. And you've seen it with both professional athletes and executives, could you speak to some of that? The people that are in your world, Michael, winning huge companies and making important decisions to understand that HIV is a metric of how the brain operates. And I would say it likely shows it before you feel it. So the prefrontal lobe as an executive is how you take in the input of the world from your family's needs to client needs to now we add AI. And all of that sensory input gets processed in the prefrontal lobe. And the game is to keep the prefrontal lobe active as long as possible for decision makers to be able to make decisions that integrate these experiences and emotions, but also allow them to inhibit impulsive responses or emotional responses to those inputs. When the prefrontal gobe goes offline, I call it taking a nap. Anyone in that position, the highest IQ in the room, can make an error. And HRV is a way for someone to expand their prefrontal lobe bandwidth to activated, to engage it. So for instance, if you were to have Michael back-to-back meetings, let's say, with CEOs and world leaders, and you didn't have a great night's sleep for whatever reason the night before. And maybe there was a train next door to your hotel room and it kept waking you up. That would be a time where you would want to go ahead and use your heart rhythms, those heart rate oscillations to be able to activate the prefrontal lobe. So there are ways with things like the garment watch to set if you're up for it, like a little vibration or a beep that every hour you take three breaths. And And interestingly enough, that from my client's self-report and they're pretty keen on this process and how it's helped them, prevents cognitive fatigue. The people that were tired by one are not tired till much, much later. And they're making decisions that they feel are much more effective and more aligned with outcomes that they're desiring. Does that answer your question? Yes, absolutely. For those listening, let's say they don't have a fitness tracker, they don't have a whoop and aura ring. Is there another way that they can get a sense of what their HRV is, how to track it? Imagine you should get a heart rate monitor, right? Oh, you read my mind. So I will tell you that is a very inexpensive and very easy scientifically reliable way to do it. And I'll tell you what you can do, whether it's a watch that measures your heart rate, but it has to be in real time because some watches you like a four second delay and that doesn't really work. But if you wear one is the polar strap, I'm sure there are watches that do real time heart rate monitoring now, but the polar strap is one. And if you wear the polar strap and you can have the heart rate then on your on your iPad or on your phone and you know your general range, when you sit at a desk and you don't move, Michael, what do you know what your heart rate is when you're still in just sitting? Usually like 55. Great. So what I would say in that situation is that if your heart rate is 20 beats higher, 75, you're not allowed to make a decision without taking three breaths. You're in a kind of a heightened state, like almost like sympathetic. That's right. It's a real quick way numerically to say chances are I'm in a sympathetic dominant state. And when I'm in a sympathetic dominant state, my elite cognitive ability fragments, and it may just fragment a little, but it's not total. It's not 99.9% you and we want all of it all the time. So that is one just quick way to be able to use this in the moment without having some of the more expensive gear. And I know I live with this earlier, but just one of the biggest practices that thanks to you that I started to put in place was breath work. And before I mean, I remember I did my first breath work session. I sat down 15 minutes and it felt like an hour, right? I was just like, man, this is, I don't know how I'm going to do this every day, twice a day. And. What is the thing? I think it was what 10 weeks now it's been well past 10 weeks. I still do it every day. I'll honestly probably do it for the rest of my life. But can you speak about breath work? How's it different from something like meditation, like the impact that it can make and just like, you know, basically anybody can do it. It's free. You know, the original protocol from decades ago was 20 minutes, twice a day. I see the same gains with 15 minutes, twice a day. So I've said to my clients, 15 is great, but give me 100%, not 99, 100. And we shake on it and we make a commitment. What happens? That's different than other forms of breath work. And I am a big advocate of meditation, but it does not produce unless you meditate for years, a reliable, consistently, breath, lookable change in, it's called baro reflex function. And so the baro reflex is a mechanism that has to do with heart rate and blood pressure. And so I want you to imagine every resident brass is strengthening what's called the baro reflex and making it more precise, okay? More precise. So that means we're not relaxing you. It means you can be an F1 driver and you can accelerate and decelerate with less effort. That's what I want. Meditation allows for calming of the nervous system. It can lead to prolonged state changes, but the baseline changes we see with heart rate variability, biofeedback, the 15 minutes, twice a day at your resident frequency are reliable across populations, genders and so forth. Kids interestingly enough do it faster. And so you will see and I assume they're younger and more resilient, but it's really incredible kids that go through this. I did an athlete brought me his son a while ago and his son came in at week. It was two or three and usually we don't see these gains until seven where cardiovascular endurance significantly extends and we should talk about that actually at why. I think he came in and he's eight or nine years old and he said, "Doc, I ran further than I've ever run in my whole life. I was supposed to run 800 meters at school and I just kept going. I ran for three miles on the track. I just wasn't tired." He said it's the breathing and then I looked at his HRV. His HRV showed significant gains but I've seen that consistently with kids which is really interesting. To the extent Michael, my kids have fit bits and they don't wear them all the time. But sometimes they get them out or I might gently suggest and so that they can see their heart rate and I have them practice bringing it down. And that is something an executive can do. Why would you want to just practice bringing down your heart rate? Decelerate it. It's not relaxation. It's the ability to return to baseline self. So I want to give you the concept. I don't believe in peak performance. I think peak performance is for people who are not at their place of excellence and they're looking to have these gains. I think that everybody in this world has innate gifts at which they operate at states of excellence. You have such beautiful gifts in the way you touch the world both serenably and just inspiration and motivation and there are some pieces of that no one taught you. You just that's you. And being able to bring yourself back to baseline. So when something in the world triggers your nervous system, it's decreasing the variance between points of excellence. It's not the peak. So this gets back to the deceleration of heart rate because we're getting back to baseline as fast as possible. Yeah. It's almost like training resilience to some extent or even tolerance perhaps. It's funny when you're mentioning kids. So this is something as you know with kids, things are caught not taught and my kids saw me doing my breathing like every morning and are oldest or seven year old. She would start to ask is I can I go breathe with daddy? So we do this thing in the mornings a lot of times. Usually two days a week may sometimes more. But she'll join me and she'll sit in breathing with me and beautiful. Yeah. Like what we found like before her emotional regulation, she's you know seven year old wasn't great. And now like that every time I tell what she gets into like this heightened aroused state, we say, okay, the breathing right she practices the breathing. I can see her do it. It's cute. And she gets back into non aroused state. That's really interesting. I'll be very curious if you get her a little fit bit that the ability. And it's not just kids adults feel it too to be able to be in control of your numbers. But especially for a seven or eight year old who doesn't feel in control of much, but wants to be in control of a lot, being able to control where their heart rate is boost their confidence. Yes. Yes. Very much so. So I want to ask then getting back into breath work. Like can you and a delve into for somebody listening like how they can even get started? I mean, I'm sure there's apps out there that exist. How can they go about finding like their residents, you know, like breathing rate like just essentially, if they say, look, I want to get started right after this podcast. I'll set aside 15 minutes. What do they do next? 15 minutes. Twice a day will be something that changes your life. Trust me. I promise. It is worth the investment. So you want to do it. Where do you start? There are different wearables that one can track HIV with and the aura ring is very, very good. Eight sleep is helpful for that nocturnal and gives a lot of information around sleep and how sleep impacts HIV, which is really one of the most dominant causes for low HIV. And those others and my book heart breath mind. I wanted to bring this process from research because there's so many articles. I mean, there's a study where heart transplant patients go through 10 weeks of HIV training and at least half of them don't have shown gains in their heart that have the doctors saying, So let's give it more time. we may not need to proceed with this operation just yet. That's pretty amazing to think about. So I wanted to take the research that is scientifically sound, but put it in a format that people could understand and go, "Okay, this is what I do, this is what I buy, this is what I focus on this week." And that's what my book is. It's available in nine countries. I'm heart-breath-mind. It's definitely on Amazon. I love all questions HIV. It is my heart-breath-mind. This joy that it brings the world in so many different ways. And so people have questions. It's not a burden. I love it. Reach out to me. But that will give you a protocol to follow and make this yours. And I give you options. So you can customize it into your life. And two kind of points for doing the breathing that I recommend as soon as you wake up, put your pillow behind. And if it means you get up 15 minutes earlier, it's worth it. But that is your, you could call it your spa time. You could call it your performance time. But that time changes everything to make that the first thing you do. And if your spouse does it with you, what's really cool is that your heart rhythms sink. So you start to have these heart rhythms. You're breathing and you can breathe at different rates. But your heart rhythms find their way to sink. And it's really interesting. I've run HIV with groups. I've done it with groups of attorneys. I've done it with different groups at Google and other companies. And what we find is people who breathe together have heart rhythms that sink. And then they also say that they feel more connected. Interesting. Physiological connectedness is very real. And I'm going to go back to that example with your daughter. I bet she loves it because she can feel it. So there's my book. There's setting the morning as soon as you wake up, 15 minutes, and then before sleep. So I talk to people about having a sleep routine, getting to bed. I know it's hard, but almost everyone can do it. You can have the weekend for variability, but on sleep times. But during the week, going to bed within a 30 minute window and having a wind down routine that lets your body know I'm getting ready for sleep. And breathing can be the last thing you do right before you sleep or it can be the start of that wind down. Let's say you want to be at the sleep at 10 and you start with 9.30. You breathe for 15 minutes. Then you read for 15 minutes and then lights out. So having your set 15 minutes twice a day, I wouldn't change them because the body remembers. And if you forget, you will feel it. So I like to think of it almost like a doctor's appointment. It's on the calendar. It's non-negotiable and committing to that. And then there are different breath pastures. Even if you don't have a fancy wearable, it doesn't matter. You'll feel this. And in some ways, not having the wearables, which is when I started 20 years ago, was how we did it. And people benefited. They felt more free. Sometimes people get stuck on the numbers. Why isn't it changing? Why is it lower today? These kind of things. And I say, put all those numbers away. And just as focused, how do you feel? Do you feel expansive? Do you feel you can let go with fear? Let's get back to that central nervous system feeling. So you don't have to have the wearables. And there's several different breath pastures from easy air breath pastures to breathe plus breathing pastures. There's an abundance on the iPhone and Android that you can set. And then the last piece, people get very stuck on. I'm not sure I'm getting the right number for resonant frequency. There are a few different apps that help with that. But if you don't have access to those, then start with 6.0. Four seconds in, no inhale, six seconds out. And the four seconds is just a gentle inhale. If it's too deep, you will get lightheaded. So people want to emphasize the inhale. And it's actually the exhale. So gentle inhale for, and then an exhale through the mouth for six. And it's almost like blowing on warm soup. My book takes you through a protocol. So it's not just inhale and exhale. We go through exercises where you learn to breathe away stress. You learn to shift your heart rhythms to shift your mental state. And I take you through a fun little journey that is customized to you where you learn, wait, I can shift my heart rhythms to shift my emotional state to shift my cognitive state and so forth. Now if somebody commits to this practice on, on average, I mean, this is my first question when I started was just how long until I start to see or like experience the benefits, right? Like I mean, I felt better right away after the first session, but just in terms of showing up like day to day, I couldn't necessarily pin a specific week on it. I definitely saw an improvement. But what are you typically seeing in the people you work with? I tell people you just have to trust me till week four. Most people feel something right away or by week two. There are just some people that aren't built for the same type of sensory experiences as other people. I call them the orthopedic surgeons in the world. And I love orthopedic surgeons. It's nothing negative. But what I found is there are certain subsets of people who whose nervous systems just don't feel the same type of sensitivity to things in the world that other people would. And it allows them to do things other people can't in positive ways. And so those type of people it takes a little longer. But by four weeks, we see measurable gains in what's called baro-reflex function that precision over, okay, your heart rate has gone up. We want your nervous system to detect it on its own and bring you back to baseline. And that's the key difference with what you're building with HIV versus meditation. I love meditation and it has some effects that are specific to meditation. But the effect from HIV that you can't get in the same way in the short amount of time is that that you essentially develop the ability for the nervous system to sense when you're off balance. And the parasympathetic nervous system jumps in and says, "Hey, Michael, we've got to get back to baseline." And then resets you a lot faster. And people call it letting go. So when they come in around week four, I hear some amazing stories about about their experience letting go that things like traffic just don't bother them the same way. It could be something about a family member just doesn't irritate them. But it's not conscious. It's the reactivity of the nervous system and the ability for the nervous system at baseline to restore faster. Got it. What about vagal tone? You hear this being turned around. This type of breathwork improves vagal tone, the vagus nerve. Could you elaborate on that? So the vagus nerve runs throughout our body. I want you to think about it like the super information highway. And it goes from our gut through the heart all the way up to our brain. And that's what makes this so interesting that we can, by breathing in a resonant frequency, in four weeks, twice a day create changes that are positive in our vagal tone, meaning the ability to make decisions. The information is connecting faster. Gastrointestinal issues around week seven, for whatever reason, that's the number of the gastrointestinal issues start to restore because the vagus nerve also affects that area and it helps people gain homeostasis. Rather than homeostasis, that's the scientific word. I call it baseline self and bringing you back to you. Healthy you. Gastrointestinal system that can feel the world that can release it and isn't like this. And a heart that can feel deeply but can also be open. A mind that can focus and be expansive. And what is so interesting is as we increase the oscillations of heart rate, which is that peak to trough, we're able to increase the whole nervous system's ability to oscillate from the mind to the gastrointestinal system. And I'd love to just kind of explore like what impact do you see in terms of like HRV on longevity? We've had guests come on and there's all sorts of things happening in the field of longevity and just take what exercise and sleep and diet, etc. Where do you think breath work sits in terms of impact and priority for somebody? I think it's it is a must have not even a nice to have or a need to have but a must have. It allows you to function at your level of excellence with much less effort. And remember, that's the time between these spikes in heart rate and and you're you're giving your heart more space for the same output. So my goal for the PJ tour have said to me by whole nine doc and just not as tired as I used to be. I said, "Well, that makes sense. Your HIV has tripled. This seems to be work together. I've had attorneys say to me, you know, the trials that God by, you know, 3 p.m. I'm looking at the clock going, when is this going to end? And my energy is just kind of plummeted. I don't have that. And it has to do with the heart becoming more efficient. So we call it cardiovascular efficiency. The heart is in its own way less reactive in situations that it doesn't need to be in and then returns to baseline faster. So I see if a very elite amount of world leaders, this ability for them to make their biggest decisions not in high oscillation heart rate, which is what the world is thinking they need to be in. It can be helpful for different types of decisions. But volatile life decisions, I see with a very small percentage this oscillation that looks very low. It's not the huge peak to trough. We see with the PGA tour players, but it is markedly efficient. I mean, boom, boom, boom. They go into this, it's almost a superhuman mode that is not trained that there are some way that their bodies elicit that allows them to make decisions in chaos without feeling the fear. And isn't that an interesting thing to think about and that it's not psychological, it's physiological, the ability to make decisions without fear. And so depending on when this podcast launches, Alex Honald, who recently climbed like Taipei 101, like the free soul climber, I believe I listen to him on a podcast and he talked about his REM sleep, he's getting like two and a half, three hours of REM sleep. His HRV is in, it's like over 100 and he seems to be something who has very good and very strong autonomic control. Yes. And there are people in this world who have it as a gift from somewhere and it's not trained. It's like having long legs, right? You just, you have it. And I've seen, I mean, at this point, I can identify people who should have been professional athletes by virtue of what their heart does under stress. And so there are some kind of biological pieces. It's really interesting about the person you mentioned. His baseline HRV is likely very high, but I would be very curious when he's in those actual moments of climbing what his heart rate oscillations look like because I would bet to stay precise and focused and not have fear. It's not the large oscillations. It's the little ones in the moment. And what's also interesting is you take empaths, people who feel the world differently and for whatever reason can read the emotions of the room like a second language. And in those moments, those people have a natural tendency for heart rate oscillations that are much higher. So it's just interesting how the cardiovascular responses that aren't learned but are just natural affinities then impact how people perform in different ways. And as we come to a close, this being the GameChange Attorney podcast, what does being a GameChange Remain to you? It means finding your area of excellence and decreasing the variance between those moments. Then sharing with everyone else your journey. I want to give a huge thank you to Dr. Lagos for taking the time to join us on the GameChange Attorney podcast. If you found this episode valuable, here are three free ways that I can help you grow your law firm. Number one, download the first chapter of my book, absolutely free at GameChangeInatourney.com. Number two, you can shoot me a text at 404-531-7691 and I'll answer any question that you've got from me. And finally, number three, if you can lead this podcast a five-star review, it'll help us gain access to more influential thought leaders and bring their lessons learned here to you. For more information on our interview with Dr. Leo Lagos, see the show notes for this episode in your podcast app or visit legalpodcast.com. (upbeat music)