Dr. Cindy Geyer
speaker
241 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Dr. Cindy Geyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
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The question really becomes, what are you carrying in your body and mind when nothing is happening, when you are at rest, or at least you think you are? And that's a window into the unconscious level of stress that we're carrying. So when we talk about uncertainty stress, that's where it is. That's because it's a little bit vague and we can catch that.
Mindfulness, mindful check-ins help us just in this moment, like just ask, are you tensing up? Do a check-in with your body, your hands, your face, your eyebrows. So often we are tensing up. And we sometimes can identify why. And sometimes we can just remember, oh, right now, it's not only okay to relax. It's important for my body. I'm not needing to cope with something.
So it's that baseline state or rest state that we're learning is really different in people and is a sign of chronic, low-grade chronic stress that we can actually get to and release through different techniques. So red mind is what we've been discussing about coping in the moment when you're fired up and you need the energy, you need the stress response.
And we just don't want that to kind of go on and on and have sluggish recovery, but otherwise we need that. It's beautiful. It's why we're here today. That's our survival response. And of course, we're triggering it too much as humans with an overdeveloped cortex and the more chronic ambiguous threat we feel. So then there's yellow mind state, which is when we think we are relaxed.
It's just how are you walking around during the day? Typical day, where are you at? What's your baseline? You probably do some monitoring. You know what your autonomic nervous system is set at. And that is probably higher than we need to be at.
And so that's what we think of as our default baseline is actually carrying around a lot of both cognitive load from our thoughts, from different information screens demands. So we're a bit activated. Then there's also the unconscious stress that we can become aware of and release. So we want to bring down that yellow mind state to a more true resting state. And that's the green mind.
Yeah. I've learned a lot from monitoring, and I think that's one way to raise awareness as well as asking ourselves to become mindful of our emotions and our bodily, where we're holding stress in the body, where we're tense. The heart rate tells us a lot of things.
But the heart rate variability we think is more specific to that balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic, so more related to psychological stress, not just metabolic demands. So that's super interesting. So Costa Rica leads you to a different yellow, maybe green mind state, better baseline.
I monitored my, with my aura ring, I monitored my heart rate variability during a meditation retreat. And we know that when people slow their breathing, immediately they have, they can have a decrease in all the sympathetic activity markers. And sometimes in heart rate variability during studies.
So it's no mystery that doing these practices and doing them for longer can lead to these improvements. And that those are what we call deep rest states when we're really allowing ourselves to feel safe and to let down and let ourselves go into restorative mode. But I was surprised at how long my heart rate variability, my baseline heart rate variability took to change.
So it was only two weeks later toward the end of the retreat that my sleeping heart rate variability really improved.
tools or techniques or doorways other than meditation obviously is powerful but there's there's more than that let's explore that yeah we we have these red mind states that we don't want on all day drains our batteries stresses our mitochondria we have data on daily mood and mitochondria showing it is really sensitive to daily affect this was a um
study with Martin Picard of Columbia and we were measuring the enzymatic activity and so when we when People woke up with more positive emotion and went to bed with more positive emotion. They had higher mitochondria which we measure kind of in the middle of the week of monitoring and when they particularly at night. So there's this idea of how are we recovering from the day?
Can we maintain positive affect at the end of a stressful long day? And we certainly found the chronically stressed participants, these were caregivers, had lower mitochondria overall, but this mood effect pretty much mediated that and overrode that. So that's this pointing us to
we actually know how to increase positive affect quite quickly with gratitude exercises and other ways of thinking and being. And so how amazing to think that our mitochondrial activity might be under our control in this short-term way.
Yeah. Well, to get back to your question about the, how do we live a day without chronic stress? So we might think of red mind as like having, you know, drinking coffee all day and just keeping us in that activated mode. And we want that stress response, but we just want to, you know, use it parsimoniously, not take it for granted. When we ignore it, it can just be on all day and rush, rush, rush.
I mean, rushing and packing our day is probably the most common pernicious way that we stay in yellow and red mind.
Yeah, that's good. Yeah, they don't have much of that, do they? We must look so weird to them.
The Dr. Hyman Show · This Is Why You’re Not Sleeping Well—and How to Fix It Fast · 4 Nov 2024
podcast
But the amyloid plaque, that sticky plaque that we secrete in response to inflammation or injury, if it accumulates, of course, it can damage surrounding neurons and is associated with neurodegenerative disease and Alzheimer's disease.
It's definitely playing a role.
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