Join Dr. Jill Carnahan as she sits down with Dr. Torkil Færø, a renowned expert in using wearables to enhance health and performance. Dr. Færø shares his insights on the practical applications of wearables, including how to track and interpret heart rate variability (HRV) to gain a deeper understanding of our autonomic nervous system and overall well-being.

Dr. Torkil emphasizes heart rate variability (HRV) as a key tool for stress management and overall health improvement. He offers resources to help individuals understand their autonomic nervous system, balance stress and recovery, and adopt healthier lifestyles. Members can share data, attend workshops, ask questions to health experts, and participate in a supportive community. The site also promotes Dr. Færø's book, The Pulse Cure, which provides practical guidance on HRV-based health monitoring.

The Book: The Pulse Cure and our social website https://thepulsecure.com/
THE PULSE CURE has dominated the Norwegian bestsellers lists for 65 weeks and counting. This is the first and only book that examines the significance of heart rate variability and gives a practical and holistic plan to improve overall health. The book is translated into five languages.

Key Points

✅ The science behind wearables and their role in optimizing health.
✅ How heart rate variability (HRV) can be a powerful tool in monitoring stress and recovery.
✅ Strategies to integrate wearables like The Pulse Cure into your daily routine for improved performance and better health outcomes.

Our Guest – 👨‍⚕️ Dr. Torkil Færø

Dr. Torkil Færø is a general practitioner and emergency physician, documentary filmmaker, author and photographer.

In 1996 he was one of the first Norwegian medics to work for Doctors Without Borders when he worked in war-torn Angola. Over a 25-year career as a freelance doctor, he has worked all over Norway, had tens of thousands of consultations and gained a unique picture of the diseases that plague us. He has learned that the cause is most often found in the stresses our lifestyles place on our bodies.

Færø is also an award-winning photographer, author of Kamerakuren (The Camera Cure), and has made documentaries about his pilgrimages to Nidaros and Santiago de Compostela. An inveterate traveller, he has made his way by bicycle, motorbike, kayak, boat and car through over 80 countries, and speaks eight languages. He lives in Oslo with his wife and two children.

The Pulse Cure: https://thepulsecure.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.torkil/

Dr. Jill Carnahan, MD

Dr. Jill Carnahan is Your Functional Medicine Expert® dually board certified in Family Medicine for ten years and in Integrative Holistic Medicine since 2015. She is the Medical Director of Flatiron Functional Medicine, a widely sought-after practice with a broad range of clinical services including functional medical protocols, nutritional consultations, chiropractic therapy, naturopathic medicine, acupuncture, and massage therapy.

As a survivor of breast cancer, Crohn’s disease, and toxic mold illness she brings a unique perspective to treating patients in the midst of complex and chronic illness. Her clinic specializes in searching for the underlying triggers that contribute to illness through cutting-edge lab testing and tailoring the intervention to specific needs. 

A popular inspirational speaker and prolific writer, she shares her knowledge of hope, health, and healing live on stage and through newsletters, articles, books, and social media posts! People relate to Dr. Jill’s science-backed opinions delivered with authenticity, love and humor. She is known for inspiring her audience to thrive even in the midst of difficulties.

Featured in Shape Magazine, Parade, Forbes, MindBodyGreen, First for Women, Townsend Newsletter, and The Huffington Post as well as seen on NBC News and Health segments with Joan Lunden, Dr. Jill is a media must-have. Her YouTube channel and podcast features live interviews with the healthcare world’s most respected names. 

The Podcast

The Video

The Transcript

231: Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill: Use Wearables to Optimize Health and Performance w/ Dr. Torkil

Dr. Jill  00:00
Welcome to Resiliency Radio, your go-to podcast for the most cutting-edge insights in integrative and functional medicine. I'm your host, Dr. Jill, and with each episode, we dive into the heart of healing and personal transformation. Join us as we interview innovators, medical experts, and all kinds of world leaders in the thought process of what it takes to be healthy in optimal healing. Today, I hope to provide you with knowledge and inspiration and aid you on your journey to healing.

Dr. Jill  00:29

Today, I am so excited to dive deep and get to know my guest better. Dr. Torkil Færø is a general practitioner and emergency physician, documentary filmmaker, author, and photographer. In 1996, he was one of the first Norwegian medics to work for Doctors Without Borders when he worked in war-torn Angola. Over a 25-year career as a freelance doctor, he has worked all over Norway, had tens of thousands of consultations, and gained a unique perspective in the picture of disease that plagues us all. He has learned that the cause is most often found in the stresses our lifestyles place on our bodies. 

Dr. Jill  00:29

Færø is also an award-winning photographer and author of The Camera Cure. I won't try to pronounce that in Norwegian. He has made documentaries about his pilgrimages to various areas. As a traveler, he has made his way by bicycle, motorbike, kayak, boat, and car through over 80 countries and speaks eight languages. He lives in Oslo with his wife and two children. 

Welcome to the show.

Dr. Torkil  01:33
Thank you, Dr. Jill. Great to be here.

Dr. Jill  01:34
It is an honor to have you with all of your world travels and everything. I always love to start the show with your story of how you got into medicine. Medicine is such an analytical field, but then you're creative—photographer, writer, traveler. Tell us a little bit about your journey into medicine.

Dr. Torkil  01:56
Yes. I actually started medicine because I wanted to live a free life. Because in Norway, you can work as a freelance doctor just as I'm doing now. I'm on one week of work in the north of Norway, north of the Arctic Circle. And I've been working like this for 25 years—working full-time, maybe two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, and then going off traveling somewhere or teaching photography or learning photography or making documentaries. And I found out that [by] being a doctor, I could have it all. I could have an interesting job as a doctor, getting to know how people live, what drives them, what makes you sick, what makes you healthy. And at the same time, being able to make money and then go have an adventurous life. That was my goal. And of course, I thought there was no prestige in this, no professors or PhDs or importance in it.

Dr. Torkil  03:00

So that was my way into medicine. And I didn't really care so much about medicine from the beginning. That was my ticket to be on the front row of life—to do my job. And of course, what we learned in medical school is not what we now know. We need to create health. We learned how to repair disease but not how to create health. 

Dr. Torkil  03:30

The reason why I got interested in that was personal. As I was sailing with my family, we were supposed to be on a four-year round-the-world sailing with our own boat. And one year into the journey, I got a text message telling me that my father had gotten cancer. We just packed up the boat. We were in the Panama Canal just getting ready to cross into the Pacific. We just packed up the boat, went home, and three months later, my father was dead. Just four months after he had been on the boat, seemingly being healthy. And I took a look in the mirror and I saw that if I continued to live like this, I would probably not become even 70. And I just saw that if I want to live as long as I can and be able to have these adventures and keep doing it, I need to change my whole life around. And so I did. 

Dr. Torkil  04:41

I started exercising, losing weight, caring about what I was eating, caring about my lifestyle. In the last five years, I've been using smartwatches, using my heart rate variability also to be able to track these lifestyle changes. That ended up being the book, The Pulse Cure, which has been a tremendous best-seller in Norway for close to two years now and translated into eight languages. I've written a book on: Which are the most important lifestyle changes you need to live a healthier life? 

That was a long story now, but that was basically it. 

Dr. Jill  05:25
That was beautiful because so often it is these transformative experiences, like either our own suffering or illness or someone that we really love that dies or that gets ill. In our traditional training of medicine, we talk about stress. And we know that data is so powerful. There's so much data on the stress, but we're not really taught, “Well, what do we do about that?” I don't know about you, but were you taught in medical school what to do with stress?—because I know I wasn't.

Dr. Torkil  05:57
No. I don't think it was even the subject. We knew about the sympathetic part of the nervous system as fight, flight, and freeze, but nothing else [other] than that. And now we know it's so much more. It's what you eat. It's if you don't sleep, if you don't exercise, alcohol—all of these things that can stress our systems even more than mental stress. Nobody knew much about that. We weren't taught that. We weren't taught how to create health. We were only taught how to categorize disease and find the treatment and the mechanism behind it.

Dr. Jill  06:37
Wow, it's so parallel to my own journey. And yet that root cause—looking at the air that we breathe, the food that we eat, the things that we spend our time doing, the relationships that we're in, and so many other things—really, really do affect that trajectory towards disease or away from it. And most people are still in the model of wanting a pill to fix it. And it's not that way, is it?

Dr. Torkil  06:59
Yeah. And the patients that come to me here—it's a standard job as a GP; I do all the emergencies around the clock—would still expect getting a pill or being referred to somebody with a procedure or another pill. And here I still keep doing that job. I do what is expected of me. I don't necessarily say, “Okay, you can change your life.” They don't really want to hear that. That was the frustrating part—that I knew what they needed to do, but they didn't want to hear that message. They wanted a quick fix.

Dr. Jill  07:42
Yeah. I remember that when I really got into functional/integrative medicine and I was spending an hour with a patient getting to know them and talking about their diet, their lifestyle, their supplements, their practices, all those things. And then when I first started my practice, I needed to make money on the side, kind of like you mentioned your lifestyle. And for us, it's urgent care or emergency work where you can do… And it was always so hard to go from that integrative/functional approach where we're looking at root cause and getting to know the patient and then going over and doing the urgent work. Like you said, the patients are like: “No, just give me a pill; I have a sore throat.” And granted, that's a good example of where you might need something that just takes care of the acute problem. But they might come in with being overweight or a chronic infection or something where you and I could look and say, “There's more to this picture,” but they don't always want to hear it. 

Tell us more about The Pulse Cure because I think it has to do with heart rate variability and some of this. How did you land on that? And then how did you decide to write a book on it?

Dr. Torkil  08:44
The first time I heard about heart rate variability, I was sailing—I was close to Tahiti—and I was lying in the hammock reading the book by Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score. And he was telling about this metric called heart rate variability that could tell you whether you were in the parasympathetic mode or in the sympathetic mode. And I thought, “Wow, we have a measure for this!” That was so interesting. And through some serendipity, I got to know that we had these ECG monitors that you could use. And for two years, I used that only for my own sake to be curious about my own nervous system, my own physiology. For a couple of years, I did that. 

Dr. Torkil  09:35

Then I got to know that we had Oura rings, we had Garmin watches. Devices that half of us already have could show the heart rate variability, which gives us a device that we can see the intensity of our own autonomic nervous system, which makes it so much easier to regulate it. And that is what I've been doing. 

Dr. Torkil  10:04

And my publisher got to know that I was into this and asked me if I could write the book. And this is actually the first book in the world on how to use the variables to track your autonomic nervous system. I know that Navaz Habib, who was on your podcast—a brilliant guy—had written about the vagus nerve and also touched into this, that you could use the variables. But this is actually the first one really combining the variables into heart rate variability.

Dr. Jill  10:37
It's so exciting. So let's go back. You and I know a lot about parasympathetic, sympathetic, heart rate variability, vagus nerve. But let's give a primer to the listener who's out there, maybe like: “What are you talking about? What is heart rate variability?” Give us the definitions of the basics and why it matters to our stress response and to chronic and complex illnesses.

Dr. Torkil  11:00
In the bottom of our brains, literally and evolutionary, we have the autonomic nervous system—the on-and-off system—the system that works even when we're sleeping or unconscious to keep us alive that will govern and regulate all our internal organs and our physiology. This has two parts: It's the sympathetic part that mobilizes us towards what we want or away from something that is chasing us, something that threatens us, and will raise our heart rate, will make us breathe faster. And it will push down the immune system for the time being. On the other hand, we have the vagus nerve with the parasympathetic system—that is, the rest and digest system, the restorative system—that after we have been chasing or are being chased, we need to recover. And that's the system that makes that possible. 

Dr. Torkil  12:06

The good thing is that these states will be shown in the heart rate variability. Because when we're in the relaxed state, then when we breathe in and there's more oxygen in the lungs, the heart rate will go a little bit faster to exploit that there's more oxygen. And when we breathe out in the parasympathetic mode, then the heart rate will slow down a little bit, measured in milliseconds, but still detectable. And you can also feel it if you feel your carotid artery; you could feel this difference. The pulse will be in a wave, faster and then slower. But if we're in the sympathetic mode and the activated mode, the heart rate will beat at a very steady pace like a metronome. And there will be a sliding scale from deep rest until really, really intense activation. 

Dr. Torkil  13:00

These variables will be able to tell you this in the moment. Right now I should be quite relaxed. Yes, I have a 33 on my monitor here, which is on a 0–100 scale, so I'm calm now. So we get the result in the moment. You can see your physiological speed. And of course, the devices will keep track of it the whole day and night. So while you are busy living your life, communicating [and] doing interesting things, the heart rate will reveal the load on your body, the load on your system. And too much load in our system compared to little recovery—that is the base of the problems in modern-day diseases that will create this low-grade inflammation that we know so much about now.

Dr. Jill  13:56
And perhaps this is really root, root, root cause of all complex chronic illness. I couldn't agree more. One thing for me that was a big aha was [that] in medicine, if we have an obstetrics patient who's delivering a baby, we have a monitor on that baby. And it's my understanding that that's really just the heart rate variability of the infant in utero. And it's a way for us to assess the baby inside the mother—of how their stress levels are. And we go take them to a C-section; we assume fetal distress when that heart rate variability gets really abnormal. So for me, that was always a big aha: We've used this for decades as a technology to assess the in-utero health of the baby. It's just that it's been more recently that we've thought about it outside the uterus as our whole rest of our life and assessment. Any thoughts on that?—because this technology is not new.

Dr. Torkil  14:47
Yeah. And the knowledge about heart rate variability is old. There's so much research on this. Almost any condition you can think of, if you Google it on heart rate variability, you will see findings because this is an easy metric to get in research. So there's so much knowledge about it. Also from, as you say, pregnancies and so on. 

Dr. Torkil  15:13

And of course, even the ancient doctors knew this—that the vital signs of breath and heart rate were their window into the state of the patient. And somewhere along the road, we forgot that. But now it's back again as maybe one of the most important things we can keep track of. Our heart rate can reveal so much more than we could dream of even as doctors, I think.

Dr. Jill  15:42
It's so important. I love it. And again, it's very accessible because you don't need an expensive machine, and even the wearables are pretty affordable. I have both the Garmin and the Oura ring, so I track that.

Dr. Torkil  15:51

Yeah, great. 

Dr. Jill  15:52

From my experience, I would love to know maybe parameters or things that you've seen as far as improving or making the heart rate variability worse. Say I start doing a new exercise program or I sleep with a different temperature or any number of variables that I could use. I'm a true scientist at heart, so I love to track my heart rate, my sleep quality, and my heart rate variability based on the interventions I do. For example, when I started doing PEMF before bed—the pulsed electromagnetic frequency, the mats and things—that, for me, really improved not only my heart rate variability but the amount of deep sleep that I would get. And then I also noticed a correlation: When I was in REM sleep, I had a little bit more heart rate variability. 

Do you want to talk about sleep and heart rate variability and the things you've seen affect it as far as either interventions before bed or during the day to enhance sleep and heart rate variability or the things that can cause disruptions in that?

Dr. Torkil  16:54
Yeah. The first thing in The Pulse Cure is how to regulate sleep. Because once you can optimize your sleep—or maybe normalize it, I would rather say—then the body will do what it's evolved to do. You don't have to do the job. Just like exercising or doing breathwork. You just make sure that you have ideal circumstances so that you can sleep very well. 

Dr. Torkil  17:25

And that would be avoiding alcohol. I used to think that alcohol was good to wind down before the night, and I would feel that I was sleeping well. Once you get the variables, you will see that alcohol is the worst thing for your stress levels. But also late-night meals. I would also think that just having a snack or eating something before going to bed would be good. But once you start tracking it, you see that the late-night meal is not good for your stress levels. 

Dr. Torkil  18:00

What is good for your stress levels is winding down the last one or two hours before you go to sleep, dimming the lights, reading a book, or whatever gets you into the parasympathetic mode, because that can be quite different. And that is very individual. You also need those seven to eight hours of effective sleep—not only time in bed. Your device can show you that you had those seven-plus hours of sleep. And that your room should be cool and really dark. Your bedroom should be so dark you can't see a hand in front of you. These kinds of things. 

Dr. Torkil  18:42

Just as you said, this is kind of a gamification of your health. So you try to do these little things, and then you see how your body responds to it. So it's kind of a communication with your body through the heart rate and through what you can see on your device.

Dr. Jill  18:58
Love that. And it's interesting because all this has to do with circadian rhythms, and it's so powerful. I just heard a podcast recently. I went to Europe in August, and I have been to Australia too, and each time with the longer time zones, I really want to hack the jet lag perfectly. So I'm competitive with myself. And what I realize is the secret to jet lag is your meal timing. Meal timing and light, which you mentioned. The light in our eyes and meal timing. It's not about taking melatonin and all that other stuff that we can do. I completely hacked it with timing my meals according to whatever time zone I wanted to be on and creating an artificial light stimulus and then darkness according to the circadian rhythms. And I literally had no jet lag. Then I told my friends about it. Then they went to Greece the next month and the same thing like, “Jill, this really works!” 

Dr. Jill  19:49

So, interestingly, you mentioned meal timing and you mentioned light, because I think those are two of the most powerful things, even at home, to tell our bodies when is the time to sleep and the circadian rhythm. Is there anything else you talk about? You mentioned darkness and temperature. Any other things to do or times to exercise that would be helpful for enhancing it?

Dr. Torkil  20:09
Yeah. You shouldn't exercise too late. Too much vigorous activity too late will also keep the stress way into the night. If I have a late-night lecture or even fun—doing something fun and intense—that will last way into the night. And earlier, as the fight, flight, and freeze system did not include fun, then you would think that as long as it's fun, it is not taxing your system. What you quite fast will see when you start tracking your heart rate variability is that you also have to make up for the fun parts of your life. You need to recover from that part as well. That may be the reason why so many people are under-recovered. We're not necessarily overstressed, but we are, for the most time, under-recovered. We need to recover more than we thought. And when we thought we were resting, the device can tell you that it's not necessarily so. So you're not necessarily in the parasympathetic mode. Even if you're mentally calm, your body as a system could still be struggling.

Dr. Jill  21:22
Yeah. I have noticed that with my own tracking, the Oura ring. And often it'll be like, “Oh, you were in stress this much of the day”—the new scores that they're giving. I was like, “Well, I was having fun with friends.” But it goes to show that sometimes even stuff that we feel like “This is so joyful” can be a stressor on the body. Nothing wrong with that, but we have to take that adequate recovery time. 

Dr. Jill  21:40

So this leads to my next question, which is: I have a lot of type A executives and people that I see, and they're very data-driven. I am the same in some ways. I love tracking, and I believe in it. But if someone's asking and saying, “Doesn't that lead to more stress?”—to watch these devices and to use them to track us—what would you say to that person who is asking the question if it creates more of a stressor to be tracking all of these data points?

Dr. Torkil  22:10
That's probably the most common question I get. And usually, it will not happen that way. Usually, maybe for the first couple of weeks, it's very new, it's very different, and you may start looking at your heart rate more than you should. But after a while, it will be just like you're driving your car: You're just picking in your speed about how much gas you have left on the tank. So I think you would treat it pretty much like you treat the dashboard in your car. Just after a couple of weeks, you will take it in naturally. So it's not really a big problem, I think. For some people, it may be a problem because they will see that they are too stressed because 80% of us will get diseases caused by the stress. 

Dr. Torkil  23:07

I thought I would just find calm on my readings, so I was really shocked when I could see that my stress was really high. And some people could be stressed by that, but it's only a reality check. It just shows you the state of your body, just like in your car. And you just have to figure it out and be patient and allow time to get to know yourself in this way. But the reward for it [is] being refreshed in the morning and getting more energy and feeling better and being healthier, not as often sick, for example. Usually, people like that. That is why it's been such a huge success in Norway—because people feel more in control of their lives. And they're not usually stressed, as people fear, beforehand.

Dr. Jill  24:11
Gosh, I have so many questions. One thing is we talked about wearables, and we talked about Garmin and Oura. What are your favorite devices, and what do you recommend for patients?

Dr. Torkil  24:21
Yeah, that would be just them. Garmin for the activity, for the VO₂ max, for the Body Battery system—which is just brilliant—for the ability to check the speed in the moment. Just push a button, and you can see your physiological speed. For example, if you see that, “Wow, my stress was now 80,” you can do breathwork to control it. So that's brilliant. And then the Oura ring is really good for sleep and for the sleep phases. Garmin is not so good for the sleep phases. And you also have this second opinion from one other device that I like. I like that combination of the Oura and Garmin, just as you have.

Dr. Jill  25:12
I love that. I've had the Oura. I was an early adapter when no one knew what it was, maybe seven years ago. And I've had it all that time, so I have incredible data. And then just recently, as I've started training, I love the Garmin because what happened is I restarted to run again. And my running: Before, I was pushing too hard and getting heart rate way above 160. And I started to run according to my heart rate, and it changed everything. I'm running distances in the last month that I never thought would be possible because I can keep that heart rate in real-time. What do you advise as far as timing of exercise, type of exercise? Does it depend? And any heart rate goals while you're exercising?

Dr. Torkil  25:50
The most important is how your heart rate responds to the exercise afterwards. So many people only use the heart rate to find the zones as they're exercising. But that doesn't necessarily tell you so much about how your body responds to that exercise. That is the heart rate after that. And the best Garmins have the training readiness so that you can see if you're ready for training that day. If you do that, you become better at recovery. A lot of people waste too much energy. They push themselves too hard, and they don't get the payback for that because their body is not ready to take that exercise. So you need to be a lot better at recovery. And that is so nice to be exercising with heart rate variability because then you can exercise less and improve. Many people are happy about that. 

Dr. Torkil  26:52

And also, when you get this, it's not only your physical state. When it comes to exercise, that is important. You could have eaten something the day before that would [have] put your training readiness down. For example, if I eat a meal with chili in it or eat a late-night meal with desserts and food that I can't tolerate, my training readiness will be lower the day after. And of course, alcohol would be horrible for exercise. There are so many aspects that you need to take into consideration. You cannot work hard and then have a busy family life and then go all out on your exercise. We cannot take that. We're not built for that intensity. Our physiology is not made for that.

Dr. Jill  27:47
Yeah. I think that's so important because back in the day when I was doing super high-intensity intervals and my cortisol was already high, I look back at that girl and I was like, “She should not have been training that hard.” But it was this drive to do it every day regardless, and I've since learned to do it a whole different way. And now I'm just getting back into running, but I'm doing it very differently.

Dr. Jill  28:08

You mentioned recovery. I'm familiar with the Oura ring, and one of the things that they look at is how quickly, in the early part of the night, your heart rate drops to the lowest heart rate. If it dropped early in the morning, later through your sleep period, it usually tells you that you had a poor recovery or you need to rest. Do you think that measurement is accurate? I don't know much about the Garmin index of your stress ability to exercise. Do you want to describe those two variables and how we might use them?

Dr. Torkil  28:41
Yeah. The training readiness on Garmin will take many points into consideration: Your exercise level over the last days, how well you slept, and how was your heart rate variability? It's 10 different metrics that they use combined with artificial intelligence to give you a number of how well you are recovered, how much you can push yourself that day. And I would say that's really important. 

Dr. Torkil  29:10

I've seen people overtraining, overexercising, and they haven't really paid attention to those numbers. They have been pushing themselves too hard. Also, many women, when it comes to the week before menstruation, when they have the PMS period, should also not train as hard. Maybe do yoga and meditations instead and stretching and so on. Because for that week, I can see that the dip in heart rate variability can be as deep as having COVID, for example. It's a real physiological load on your system if you have the PMS symptoms there. And you can mitigate it by de-stressing, by finding calm, sleeping better, not eating crap food, and so on for that week. I would say that. And to measure your readiness for training, I'm not sure if Oura is really good for that compared to Garmin—it's really so much better. So I don't use my Oura ring for that, really.

Dr. Jill  30:17
That's helpful because the Garmin, for me, is new. The Oura has been around a long time. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. And I agree with you: The real-time heart rate—there's nothing like that in Oura. I haven't used the recovery on the Garmin, but I'm looking forward to checking that out as well. 

Dr. Jill  30:37

One thing in the notes that we talked about before the show: You mentioned the top eight strategies that give us 24 extra years to live. That sounds very interesting. Do you want to give us some of these strategies? I'm assuming these are in your book, right?

Dr. Torkil  30:49
Yeah. It's from an American research. I think it's 700,000 veterans from the U.S. military that they have been following for, I think, around 15 years. And they have seen that there are eight lifestyle strategies or areas that, if you do them right, you can live 24 years longer than if you do them wrong—if you start those lifestyle strategies from when you are 40. The good thing is that even if you start when you're 60, you will get, I think it was 16 or 18 years longer. So it is not too late, even if you get 60 or 70. 

Dr. Torkil  31:36

And the lifestyle strategies—that will be to exercise, to sleep well. It's to drink small amounts of alcohol, not too often. It's about having a good diet. It's about not smoking. It's about not using opioids. It's about having good relations. And it's having some ways to calm down, to de-stress. Those are more or less exactly my points in The Pulse Cure. And if you do all these things wrong—you have poor relations, you're smoking, you're drinking too much alcohol, you're not sleeping well—then you don't live 24 years longer.

Dr. Torkil  32:23

And this is also what I see in my clinical work—that if you do all of these things wrong, then you will be lucky to pass 70 years old. And if you do all these things right, there's a good chance that you will be 90 and beyond and still have your health and your brain in order. So I think that's really important. We're not just talking a couple of years; we're talking decades of extra life.

Dr. Jill  32:51
That's a big number. At 40, that's like a quarter or a third of your life, potentially. That's really profound. So we'll try, if you're listening, to find the study link and put that in the show notes.

Dr. Torkil  33:04
And the good thing is that all these strategies are shown in the heart rate. If you do these things right, your heart rate variability will respond to that and improve. So that's a really good thing.

Dr. Jill  33:19
Really powerful. So a couple more questions. One is: I'm in the world of mold toxicity and environmental toxins and all of that. Say I stay in a really musty hotel room, or maybe there were wildfires and the smoke was affecting me. Those will absolutely affect my heart rate variability. Have you seen that as well? And is that part of that?

Dr. Torkil  33:45
Mold—I'm not sure. Or, I haven't seen it. I'm sure if you Google “mold and heart rate variability,” you will see that there is research showing that because everything that stresses your system somehow will be shown in the heart rate. But I also know that—I'm not sure what it's called in English—when you're burning leaves and things from your garden, I've had people that have seen it in their heart rate variability several days afterwards just by walking around breathing in the smoke. So I can absolutely imagine that after a wildfire and being close to it, it will affect your system quite hard, I would think. Altitude can also affect it. You're in Colorado, was it? If you go up to the mountains, it will affect your heart rate variability a lot. Are you at a high altitude?

Dr. Jill  34:43
Yeah, 5,000 meters. So, kilometers—let's see…

Dr. Torkil  34:50
Yeah. So I would guess that if people come from Florida up to you, they would feel it. WHOOP is also a good device, I would say. According to WHOOP—they gather information from their users—alcohol is the worst stressor, and altitude is actually number two, and then disease is number three. But of course, that's American numbers. And you have the Rocky Mountains and so on, so it's probably because of that.

Dr. Jill  35:22
Very good. 

In our last little bit, one thing I want to ask is: Say someone starts monitoring and their heart rate variability is low or not great and they want to improve it; what would be your top suggestions for someone to change their heart rate variability to improve that?

Dr. Torkil  35:39
Yeah. Make sure you sleep better. See if there's something in your diet that can cause it because we can see that there are so many food intolerances that will be shown in the heart rate. If there's a big difference between the heart rate when you're fasting—which is very effective to improve your heart rate variability—to when you're eating, then there's a good chance that there's a food intolerance that is causing it. Make sure you sleep well. Also, make sure to get a good fitness level. 

Dr. Torkil  36:15

If you have a poor fitness level, you don't exercise, you're a couch potato, you may have a VO₂ max at 30 and even below, then your body is in overdrive for daily activities. So you need to very, very slowly start getting into better shape. And if you have such a low VO₂ max, then just any exercise is really taxing on their system. 

Dr. Torkil  36:45

On the Garmin Watch, after an exercise, you will get the recovery time. And my experience is that people with a really low VO₂ max, a really poor fitness level, if they do a standard jog or go for a run or exercise, can have four days of recovery time. And you wouldn't really believe that. And they would then, after such an exercise, feel inflammation and would be demotivated and would not want to continue this. So if you're in a poor fitness level, you really need these devices to help you. Start really, really slowly.

Dr. Jill  37:28
I love that because it's accessible to everybody. And we can always start with something, even if it's a walk, and then you move to running or whatever else. I really love that.

Dr. Torkil  37:37
And in the moment, I would say that the breathwork is the most important. So if you see that you're stressed, then calming down your system by slowing down your breath is probably the best way—the best lever—into your autonomic nervous system.

Dr. Jill  37:54
Is there any particular breath type, like a box breath, that you teach or that you recommend in your book, or just anything that works for the patient?

Dr. Torkil  38:04
I think that the most important [thing] is to breathe slowly. It's kind of a signal into this old, ancient system in our brains that it's calm out there. You know: This organism is breathing slowly—okay, there cannot be any war out there or any threatening situation. Just as Navaz said on your podcast, if you're laughing, it's a signal to your whole system that there's not a threat out there. We can turn on the recovery time and start the recovery process.

Dr. Jill  38:38
Super helpful. 

So, where can people find more about your book and your work and all the things that you're doing in the world? Where's the website or where would you like to send people?

Dr. Torkil  38:49
Yeah, I have a website: ThePulseCure.com. We can also see a one-hour video lecture where I can show you how I use the Garmin Watch and the Body Battery system to be able to micromanage your stress levels for this kind of game. And of course, The Pulse Cure is a normal book. It's on paperback, so you can get it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and anywhere. It's also an audiobook, an audible. Many podcast listeners like to have it on the ear. So you can get it on your iPhone and also on your Kindle. It's also an ebook. So you can find it: The Pulse Cure. And for me, I'm on Instagram; I'm Dr. Torkil—@dr.torkil on Instagram. I try to put out some information there as well. 

Dr. Jill  39:44
Fantastic. And just so I spell that, it's D-R-T-O-R-K-I-L, right?

Dr. Torkil  39:48
Yeah. It's a D-R-.-T-O-R-K-I-L.

Dr. Jill  39:51
Perfect. Okay. 

Thank you for your work in the world. Thank you for all that you're doing to support people's healing at this root level. And I think it's just so practical. I love the work because it's accessible to anyone. 

Dr. Torkil  40:05
To anyone. Yeah. And the most important [thing] is that we're shifting the power from the doctors and the healthcare system into your own hands in real-time. I think it's a super important thing.

Dr. Jill  40:18
And you and me, as doctors, are advocating that for the patients. I couldn't agree more.

Dr. Torkil  40:22
Yeah. 

Dr. Jill  40:23

Awesome. Well, thank you, everyone, so much. Thank you for coming on the show, Dr. Torkil. And thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of Resiliency Radio. As you know, you can find all of our podcasts at JillCarnahan.com or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel. Stop, leave a review, and join us next week for another episode.