Transcript of Can You Regulate a Craving Before It Becomes a Relapse? Addiction Recovery, Relapse Prevention & Nervous System Regulation with Dr. Deborah Rozman

Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to the edge. Hey, hey, my friends! Welcome back to another episode of Notes from the Edge. I am your host, Lisa Lacey, and this is the place we have the conversations we should have been having all along. Guess what? You ain't talking about it. So today we're gonna with our special guest, Dr. Deborah Rosman, and today we're exploring what happens. inside our bodies before a craving becomes a choice, and whether heart-brain coherence and real-time HRV biofeedback— we're going to be explaining what all of that is— can give people in recovery another tool for their toolbox to help in those really pivotal moments. But let me tell you about Dr. Rozman, because she's been at this for about 3 decades now. She is a behavioral psychologist, business leader, President and co-CEO of HeartMath Incorporated, which is an organization that has spent more than 30 years studying heart-brain coherence, stress, and emotional regulation.

Friends, this was well before all of us were talking about emotional regulation. She has helped guide the development of HeartMath's research-based tools and technologies, including heart rate variability, biofeedback. And friends, I did that in inpatient rehab and it was massively helpful. It's used in healthcare, corporate leadership, education, military, and professional sports environments. HeartMath's work focuses on what it calls coherence, and we'll be talking about what that is. It's a measurable physiological pattern associated with a more ordered heart rhythm and synchronization within your nervous system. Its current technology includes the Inner Balance Coherence Plus. Guys, I have one right here which allows you to see your heart rate variability in real time and change it as you're watching it change. It's so cool. Dr. Deborah, welcome to Notes from the Edge. How are you today, my friend?

I'm very good, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I'm so excited about this. As you well know, and as our listeners know because we've already been talking about it, September is Recovery Month and we're wrapping up the end of it. Um, and you and I were just having a podcast before the podcast, but it's Notes from the Edge, so we're gonna dive right in. So I want to talk about what happens physiologically When somebody in recovery gets stressed or overwhelmed or what we like to call triggered, and then they have that urge to the thing they've tried so hard to quit and might destroy everything they've rebuilt. So what is happening when we get stressed or overwhelmed?

Well, that's a wonderful question because we've researched a lot of that at the HeartMath Institute over the last 30 years and What is so interesting is that there's an emotional memory center in your brain called the amygdala. And the amygdala looks for familiar patterns and responds to them. So the amygdala is also receiving pattern from your heart, your heart rate variability. It creates a pattern with these beat to beat to beat variability changes in heart rate, which we can talk about.

Yeah.

But it signals the brain through 2 pathways through the vagal nerve. One is the amygdala, the emotional memory center, and the other is the thalamus that gives us access to bigger picture thinking and higher cortical function. The amygdala stores emotional memories. It stores habits, anxiety habits, stress habits, because it's always scanning like a pattern matching center, computer chip, for what's familiar. Okay, so remember that. So what happens if you have developed addictive behaviors, habits, whatever they are, the amygdala is going to scan for what's familiar because that's what's comfortable.

Hmm.

Even if it's not healthy for you. And that helps explain why when we get triggered, stressed, overwhelmed, the HRV pattern gets very disordered, irregular, incoherent waveform. It signals that to the 2 brain centers which go into survival mode— fight, flight, fright— or the amygdala. What's comforting? Could be comfort food. could be comforting in some other way that's healthy for you. But the habit of addiction will revert back to the craving or the pull for whatever you think you've been using to self-soothe or to comfort yourself, whether it's drugs, alcohol, gambling, all the types of addictions, food. And so understanding that's the physiological mechanism Now, in our research, what can we do about it? How do we interrupt that signal? And that's what HeartMath and your sensor helps us do.

I love that. I love that, that we, we go immediately, if we don't interrupt the pattern, to what's familiar, right? To what we know, to what we have trained Ourselves to do if we don't use some kind of tool to—

Exactly.

Yeah, interrupt the pattern. So, um, and you know, I, I just— you just taught me something I did not— and I, I knew a lot about the amygdala, but I didn't know that it was informed by the heart too. Talk to us about how important is the heart in communicating with our brains.

It is critical. It's critically important in how we develop habits that aren't healthy for us. And it's critically important in how we self-empower and self-regulate to release those habits. Here's how. It was in the 1990s, and that's fairly recent, that it was discovered that your physical heart, your beating heart, contains its own intrinsic nervous system. 40,000 neurons that are sensory neurons that can sense, feel, learn, remember, and operates independent of the brain. And the researchers who discovered that formed a field called neurocardiology, because what they discovered is that the little brain in the heart is sensing how the body feels, putting together information from like the blood pressure waves and an emotional experience. And because that's where we feel— we don't feel consciously in our brain, we feel in this area of our body. And there's a reason for that. But when we are feeling stressed, overwhelmed, anxious, that signal or that pattern of the heart rate variability is sent through the vagal nerve to the brain. So there's a 2-way communication system going on between the heart and brain. Most of us were taught the brain controls the heart. It's not true. It's two-way.

The heart's also controlling the brain by the information it sends upstairs through this independent little brain in the heart, telling the big brain what's going on in the body.

Wow. Our heart Has a brain. Who knew, my friends? You guys are learning something new every single show that we have. So, Dr. Deborah, then that might explain how you can have something intellectually, like you can know, okay, intellectually I am triggered by this event. Mom, say for instance, just using mom as an example. Mom triggers me.

Right.

I know that intellectually, but how, how is it that we can have it in our brain brains, right? Our brains, our heads, but not have it physiologically in our nervous system? How is that?

Yes. Very important question, Lisa. The mind and the intellect of the cortical functions are a slower pathway. They're reasoning, they're philosophical, they're intellectual. But when the heart communicates the pattern to those 2 centers, the amygdala is a fast path. It's going to immediately— because it's a protection, it's a survival mechanism— it's immediately going to go, what emotional memory relates to this? And it's a pattern matching, and it's going to trigger the desire, the craving, the habit before or even while your intellect knows it's not good for you. or healthy for you, or you've been there before, done that, been there but still going back to it because the amygdala's trigger has a hold on your emotional system. And so it's so important to understand— I learned this just a year ago— that a lot of anxiety habits, whether they're due to addiction or something else, really create these incoherent patterns in the heart rate variability, and they're really based on an arrhythmia. And it's like once you start to treat the arrhythmia, the signal changes to the amygdala. So this PTSD trauma, a lot of these deeply entrenched emotional experiences get stored in the amygdala.

And they become a reference of how we view life and how we make choices and the cravings or the feelings. So back to what you're saying, we need to know how we can change that communication pathway between the heart and amygdala to a healthier response.

I love that. I want to talk about— okay, so we, we now know how important the heart is. Talk to us about feelings. And the heart.

Yes.

You know, we're emotional, we're humans, we're emotional beings. So talk to us about feelings in the heart and the heart's brain.

It's so important. You know, as a behavioral psychologist years ago, I— and it's still used because it can help a lot of people— cognitive behavioral therapy, which is very cognitive, just like you were saying, helping To reason and let go of old patterns. And it works up to a point when it's not a hugely emotionally invested pattern or a strong imprint. And most addictions after a while become very strong imprints, as you well know.

I do, I do.

Yes. So to reach at that level, you have to involve the feeling world, the emotional system, and Most psychologists still think all that's up here and it's not. People more and more are realizing it's what's called somatic. It's body-related. We store feelings all over the body, but the heart is where we feel it the most and where it has the most impact on our heart rate and heart rate variability. So here's a common sense example. I say this all the time to my classes and people go, oh, if they wondered about— we don't say I love you with all my brain. No, we don't. We say I love you with all my heart. Oh, and it's a very valid point. Yes. But why is that? Because we feel there's 4 ways the heart communicates to the brain and body. I just mentioned one through the vagal nerve, but And blood pressure wave. That's 2. But energetically, the heart creates with every beat an electromagnetic field.

Mm-hmm.

And we're constantly broadcasting our HRV pattern, our heart rhythm through that field. And that's how we affect each other with our vibes. Now, when we're feeling stressed, impatient, frustrated, angry, anxious, overwhelmed, all the stressful emotions, They're not bad. It's just lingering in them creates all sorts of problems. And when we feel those emotions, the HRV pattern, not the score you see on your Whoop band or Oura Ring or Apple Watch, but the pattern of change beat to beat to beat, that's the variability. That pattern looks like a jagged, incoherent waveform. And it is because it's reflecting that HRV is a reflection of the interaction of the autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic and sympathetic. And sympathetic speeds heart rate up, parasympathetic slows it down to relax. And when the two are conflicting, it's like driving your car with one foot on the brake and one foot on the accelerator. It's a herky-jerky ride. Burns a lot of energy, a lot of gas. So stressful emotions do that, and then they signal to the brain upstairs— fight, flight, fright, survival response, stress reaction, amygdala trigger. They go out to the vibes that your family people, your pets pick up.

Mm-hmm.

And we pick up each other's vibes. So think of your heart's electromagnetic field as a receiving station and a Broadcasting station, like a radio and, or a cell phone. And the information is those signals, those chaotic, erratic signals of stress response, or when you're feeling love, care, kindness, compassion, gratitude, appreciation, joy, any of those positive emotional states. That HRV pattern changes instantly. It becomes like smooth rolling hills where the autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic and sympathetic, are in balance and they're interacting in a smooth flow. And that creates a waveform in physics that's called a coherent waveform. So that, like a sine wave, and that's why we named it Heart rhythm, HRV coherence. Now, learning to shift from incoherent rhythms to coherent rhythms, from stress to ease or calm or peace, is not about repressing the stressful emotions.

Mm-hmm.

Because that won't change the HRV because it reads what's really going on in your emotional system. You can't just think your way So learning how to shift the physiology, which is the key— how do you shift the pattern? And when you shift the pattern, it shifts your mood, it shifts how you feel, it shifts the conversation that your heart sends to the thalamus and the amygdala, and you change perception. What seemed to be this horrible big deal, you now view in a more balanced light because your autonomic nervous system is more balanced and it's signaling the brain out of survival fight-flight mode into more what we call a coherent mode. Heart-brain coherence synchronizes the alpha rhythm to the coherent heart rhythm, and that's the beginning of self-empowerment, of self-regulation. Of athletes we work with call it the flow state, and you can shift quickly into that state and begin to Repattern what's familiar to the amygdala.

I love it. I love— okay, the— there's so much there. So friends, listeners, please note that Dr. Debra said you cannot repress the emotions and have them just go away, right? I tried it for 20 years, ran and running straight into a bottle. It did not work. It was when I turned and faced and felt, said felt with my heart and my chest space. She also said we have an energetic field, electromagnetic field that our heart gives off. Dr. Deborah, how wide is that? I've heard 3 feet, 6 feet. Does it just depend?

Well, the magnetometers, generally the instruments we have generally can only measure 3 to 5 feet. depending on how strong the field is. We know it goes farther than that. You know, a mom knows her child was upset in the other room, even though the child isn't crying. That field, the mom is so tuned to it. It could be across the country. We don't know what the limitations of it. That's part of what HeartMath Institute is researching. But you're so right that you can, you know, the heart rate variability, Rhythm is what you're truly feeling, whether you intend to shift it or repress it or vent it. What's so incredible about this metric is that we can learn to work with it and harmonize it and be able to take charge of our emotions so we don't have to vent or repress. We learn how to balance and clear and shift. And that's the incredible power of HRV biofeedback.

Balance, clear, and shift.

Yeah.

So talk to us about coherence, the word coherence, for people that are listening that may not know what that word means, understand what you guys are saying that word means. So what is coherence in, in this setting as we're talking about it? Getting into balance.

Coherence is at every level of nature. There's quantum coherence and how this, the molecules and atoms of everything interact without blowing up or falling apart. And all of nature is so beautifully ordered and harmonized. So is our body. Coherence means— always means order, harmony, and stability. So if you talk about a coherent conversation, we're real clear, it's ordered logical thinking. We talk about a coherent waveform in physics, it's a sine wave. It kind of looks like rolling hills. That's a coherent waveform. So that's what we call that heart coherence. But that waveform is so powerful, it entrains or synchronizes the brainwaves to its pattern. And your blood pressure wave, your respiration wave, your HRV wave, they all entrain to that same rolling hills pattern. It's quite a phenomenon. And when you send love, to somebody and they're receiving it, or to your dog— we have research on this— or to your horse, the horse's HRV pattern goes into that same mode. We are connected in the heart and in loving and caring feelings by these frequencies, by these patterns. And once you start looking through the, the lens of pattern, So much more is available to you and to researchers to see how the physiology works.

You know, there's sayings we have that we thought were metaphors, like the heart knows, or listen to your heart for the answer, or put your heart into it, sing with your heart. They all have physiological connections. Oh, even like heartache, heartbreak. Or shut down your heart, close off your heart for protection. All of that's happening on that energetic level, and it's learning how to work with the energetic heart that is the key.

Yeah, learn, because it can be practiced. We can train for it, and we can learn how to revisit that feeling or moment of coherence and balance. So speaking of that, let's talk about the Inner Balance Coherence Plus.

Sure.

So if you— and it's so— I love it. It's so easy to use. And like I said, when I went into inpatient rehabilitation, it was a dual diagnosis center. We did neurofeedback, we did biofeedback. But when I got out, it was very difficult to find something that was affordable that I could use in my home. So this is just an absolutely amazing tool to add to my toolkit. So Talk to us about what's happening because it's happening in real time, which is so cool. So you hook the sensor up, you put the battery on your shirt, and then what?

Yes. Well, I have one here. I'll just show you. You're clipping this sensor onto your earlobe because that's the most sensitive place to pick up your heart rate variability. And you turn it on and you clip this to your shirt. And then you open up the app so you can see what's going on. And the app is either the HeartMath app, or we have an Inner Balance app, and you see your heart rate variability, but you don't just see a score like you see in an Oura Ring or Apple Watch. HRV is becoming very popular since we first popularized it back in 1995. However, what they're measuring is what's called recoup. You know, when you— how much resilience you have, amount of HRV, how powerful your heart rate variability is, which is important for sports, for health measures, because not enough amount of HRV, that's What we call the vertical axis can be a predictor of health problems. What we're measuring, which gives you the power to regulate, is training you to see and understand the beat-to-beat-to-beat variability changes, the x-axis, the pattern over a minute, 3 minutes. And that's where you see your emotional state reflected.

That's where you see the waveform. And that's teaching you, training you with the app software, how to shift that waveform real time. So you watch yourself going from this incoherent stress waveform to this coherent, calm, balanced waveform, and your feelings go with it. Yeah, you're not repressing. You're shifting the physiology and shifting how you feel, shifting how the heart and brain talk. That lifts your vibration, lifts you to another perspective, and you go, oh wow, look at that.

You see, you can think clearer, you make clearer decisions, you can think better, you just feel better. The people around you feel better because you're not still cranky or whatever you were, you were having in the moment. And I just love the fact that it's in real time so that you can train on how to revisit that state at any point in time in the future through daily practice.

Absolutely. And then what happens, like if you have an Oura Ring, a Whoop Band, using a Garmin, Apple Watch for HRV. They don't train you. I have so many customers coming to us say, how do I— I've got a low score. What do I do? Well, the score isn't helpful unless you know how to improve it. So HeartMath trains you in how to develop that skill so that you will have more HRV. It usually takes a few months because you're building a new habit. You're building a new baseline. So when you're not doing anything, not doing a HeartMath technique, don't have the biofeedback, and we would then have you hooked up into one of our recorders, your natural resting state would have more natural coherence in it. So you're moving through life in more of that presence, more of that self-empowered state. And that's what you want to do. You want to practice daily. usually in 6 to 9 weeks, people who report even often to always they have problems with sleep or exhaustion or indigestion or migraines or headache, you know, just all the physical symptoms, and they have problems with anxiety or depression or a lot of overwhelm or anger.

Their physical and emotional go together.

Mm-hmm.

They interrupt that process through daily practice, and we're just talking 5 minutes in the morning, 5 minutes in the evening, They sleep better. And within 6 to 9 weeks, they have a new baseline of coherence. Plus during the day when you're not, you don't need the sensor, you're developing, as Lisa said, that internal reference, the HeartMath technique, which is very simple of how to go back and recreate that state like you do when you're using the biofeedback.

I absolutely love it. I absolutely love it. So how can this be useful— nervous system regulation training, practicing— as an additional tool for us in recovery, in addition to our meetings and our therapy and our community and our spiritual practices and our changed behavior? How can this be a valuable tool for us in recovery to add to our toolkit?

I believe it's essential. It powers you up. You try to do all those other things from a stressed state, from an incoherent waveform, you're fighting your physiology because it's in that stress response pattern. And it makes it harder to do the other methods that you know are beneficial. That's why relationship support— that tends to open the heart and get you into more coherence because you're feeling more care or love. That's getting you into coherence. But this way you are taking charge yourself. You're learning how to create those feelings genuinely to align your heart, brain, and nervous system so that it powers up your ability and your effectiveness at everything else you're doing.

And when we're aligned, when we raise our vibration, my friends, guess what we get more of? We get more of the good stuff. We get more of the love. We get more of the joy. We get more of the prosperity, more of the abundance. When you raise your vibration and are more consistently throughout your day— not perfection, progress—

Right.

But more consistently throughout your day at a higher vibration, better things are gonna start coming your way. That I have seen happen time And time and time again. So I absolutely love this as a practice tool, a pivotal practice tool for training to revisit throughout your day that space of alignment and balance. So, and in real time. So, Dr. Deborah, talk to us about that, some of the The stories, the success stories that you've had?

Oh, there are so many. I have people telling us from all walks of life the difference. And one of the things that's so different as you start practicing this internal coherence state is you create more space between stimulus and response, so you have more choice, you know. So when something happens that the amygdala gets triggered And you've practiced this coherence, there's more of an internal pause that lets you get in sync and make more effective choices. Even if you still feel some of the pull, you're able to recognize it and keep using, like, the quick coherence technique that we have, heart-focused breathing that some people find just that. Brings the autonomic balance and starts easing the trigger. So it's so important to ease off the trigger, or you'll compensate doing something, whether it's the addictive behavior or another addictive behavior, some issue. Because you want to be able to— when you feel the urge or the stimulus or the craving, you want to have more space between that and the reaction. Yeah, a lot.

Yeah, and another piece of recovery that I think is so pivotal to remember for a lot of us— it was the case in my case, and we're coming up on 9 years alongside my husband, who I told you was my accountability partner— is, um, space, peace, not being in chaos feels weird at first, right? And you almost want to go into a self-sabotage state if you don't have that pause moment to make clear decisions, because it, it feels so abnormal and unfamiliar at first. It's like, wait, wait, wait, something's about to happen because nothing's happening.

So you said the key word of unfamiliar, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

Go back to the amygdala. It's looking for what's familiar to give you comfort. So it's going to choose anxiety or the stress response or the addiction because it's familiar. And when you first start doing this, it can feel unfamiliar, but it's self-soothing. So it— your question, I want to make sure I answer it. How does this tool or technology help with all the other things you're doing in recovery. It gives you more of that centeredness, more of that self-soothing, more of that self-regulation capacity so that the other things you do are more effective. They're powered up.

Yeah, it is empowering, you know, that you're able to regulate in order to make wise mind actions and decisions and behaviors in, in those healthy Pauses that feel a little weird at first. So, all right, Dr. Debra, if somebody's out there listening and they're new in recovery, or they've been in recovery for a while but urges are back, or they are thinking about jumping into recovery, what would you tell them about our body's ability to change if someone's out there about to give up? Or have, have already given up on continuing to try recovery? What would you tell them about our, our ability to change behavior?

When we change physiology, it powers up our ability to change the behaviors. It's so empowering. I'll tell you a story. You asked me for a story. Yes, rabbit holes.

Go down one.

Yeah, I was on a podcast probably in May, that the host was named Brad Jensen. And he had been using our, one of our techniques, which I'll teach everybody called heart-focused breathing. And he had been in recovery and sober for, I think it was 8 years, a long time. Then he went through a very painful divorce with a young child.

Oh, I'm sorry.

And he was really ready to go off the wagon, really ready to get back into the drugs, anything to get out of that pain.

Mm-hmm.

And a friend of his who became a HeartMath certified coach taught him the heart-focused breathing technique and said, this will change your autonomic nervous system, change the sympathetic reactions you're having and your parasympathetic. It'll change how your heart and brain talk. So just do that every time you feel the pain or the stress or you feel the urge. And he did. He said it saved his life. It saved everything.

Wow.

And he's now a spokesperson for HeartMath, you know, because of that. But that's just one of many stories. Addiction clinics are using it. Again, it's like changing your baseline physiology. So you have more ability, capacity to recover and to sustain that recovery and re-go back to it, the techniques and technology to really refine your practice if you feel like you're going to fall off the wagon.

Yeah. Yeah. So teach us a tool, teach us a tool today that we can stick in our back pocket today. What do you got?

What do you got? It's called heart-focused breathing. It's so simple. And a lot of people, a lot of programs will tell you to breathing exercises or just breathe. This is a very specific exercise of breathing that does several things. One is it helps bring your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system into balance, your HRV into coherence, and send a different signal from your heart to your brain. So that you have more of that inner calm and coherence and clarity all the way to the frontal lobes, your executive decision-making center. So it's— a lot of breathing exercises are helpful. This one is the one we've researched that helps to open the heart and activate that heart-brain coherence. So step 1 is to focus your attention on the area of your heart. And you can put your hand on your heart if that helps you to keep the energy out of here and into here. That's the first step, and that can be hard for some people, so just keep practicing. Now, after you do this heart focus, we do heart focus breathing. Pretend your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area. Where you have your hand on your heart, where you feel feelings, unless they happen to have been closed off because of experience, which is okay.

It'll reopen. But you want to breathe in through the area of the heart and out through the area of the heart. Breathe a little slower, a little deeper than normal. Find an easy rhythm that's comfortable. If you do this 10, 15 breaths, you change your autonomic nervous system response.

Ah, it feels so good just to do it for a few seconds.

It does. And we just Tell people to do it for a minute or longer, however long if you can. And you can do it 20, 30 times a day. You can do it in a meeting when you get triggered. Just shift your focus to the heart and do that heart-focused breathing. And I know people, executives, athletes, people in recovery, they do it 20, 30 times a day. And as you do that, it starts to create a different nervous system response and baseline. But you don't have to stop there. The quick coherence technique to really sustain that heart rhythm coherence is to actually find something as you're breathing through the heart area that you appreciate or that you're grateful for. And if you can't feel anything, just what helps you stay calm. And you breathe that attitude or feeling in through the area of the heart and out through the It does change your brain immediately. Yeah, it does.

To use your word earlier, instantly. If you are focused here in, in the body, right? Focus.

Yes.

And we're getting grounded at the same time. We're changing our vibration at the same time. I mean, so much cool stuff is happening just from us doing this heart-focused breathing. So, so, so much more to learn. Um, so excited about, uh, having you on, Dr. Deborah Rozman. Where can people go to find you, to find more information about HeartMath, and most importantly, find the Inner Balance Coherence Plus?

They can simply go to heartmath.com. That's H-E-A-R-T-M-A-T-H.com. Learn all about the research, get the inner balance. They can contact me at info@heartmath.com. There's different training programs, the HeartMath app, they can download that. There's so many resources because our passion and mission, those of us who've been doing this for 30 years, is to really help activate the heart of humanity. Can you imagine if more and more people could balance their emotions and have more care and compassion and gratitude, which is what brings the HRV into coherence and synchronizes heart and brain for lifting our vibration and perception, we'd have a much healthier, happier society.

Yes. Well, in my household, we're all fighting over my one device. So I've got to get my adult daughter one and my hubby one. We all struggle in our own ways. So Uh, we are all going to, uh, be working with them and super, super excited about that. Friends, you don't have to write that down. We're gonna put it in a clickable link in show notes.

Great.

Yeah, so Dr. Deborah, though, before I let you go, we always ask our guests 2 questions. Are you ready for the first one?

I'm ready.

Okay, in your own life, what do you feel like you performed In order to survive or just get by? And what did setting down that role, that mask, or that performance do for your life?

Hmm, big question. You know, I think if I go back a number of years, I was in love and circumstances ended that relationship and I was heartbroken, which really isn't the heart, it's really expectations and emotions that were broken, but you feel it in the area of the heart. And what actually helped me then, which is a guiding principle for me now and since, is what I call heart vulnerability. Meaning sharing it with someone openly, vulnerably. That strips— when you go through with crisis like that, it strips away the pretense, and then just becoming more of your own honest, vulnerable, real self. It's a restart, but it really helped open up new perspectives. This is before HeartMath. New perspectives. And I had to heal from that, you know, just like you heal from Any sort of trauma. And, uh, but a key is that I've learned, and our founder of HeartMath says all the time, Doc Childrie, when vulnerability stops, that self-honesty and honesty with others from that deep place, all progress stops.

Oh. So my friends, if you're out there and you're struggling, say something. That's what Dr. Deborah is saying. Find somebody who is safe and open your heart to them, even though sometimes it's scary to do so, and get it up and out so you can release it. All right, Dr. Deborah, last question. What do you want us as human beings to be having more conversations about that we are not talking about with each other?

Love, compassion for yourself as well as others, the power and the intelligence of your heart, exploring that and of other people's hearts. We're all connected in the heart. Our minds are all different, but we're all the same in the heart. We want the same thing deep down. The heart is the next level of human unfoldment, human evolution. And that was said by the ancients. And then we developed mind, which is okay.

Mm-hmm.

Now we have to bring the mind back to the heart development, and then we'll be at our next level. So I want people to talk about the heart and get the help they need, the tools they need to open their heart and live from the heart more.

Yeah, guys, definitely add all of this to your toolbox. Edge note from today's show: your heart has a brain and an electromagnetic field. That is the vibe that you're putting off and that people feel. And I'm going to close out like we do every show and ask you listeners out there, what might you be performing in order to survive or just get by? And what do you think setting that role, that mask, that performance down will do to lighten your load just a little bit today? When you find the answer to that, I'm your host Lisa Lacey. You're with our special guest, Dr. Deborah Rosman. We will see you at the edge. Thank you, Dr. Deborah.

Oh, thank you, Lisa. I'm honored.

Yeah, this was a good one.