Stress is part of life, but learning how to handle it well can make a big difference for your health and well-being. When we don’t have the right tools, even small problems can start to feel overwhelming. The good news is, there are easy ways to bounce back and stay on track. But what if there was a way to actually measure how well you’re handling stress?
In this episode, I talk with Matt Bennett, founder of Optimal HRV. We dive into heart rate variability (HRV) and how it relates to your body’s ability to recover from stress. Matt shares how HRV tracking can give you early signs of health issues before symptoms even show up. He also talks about affordable tools and breathing techniques that can help anyone improve their stress response and build resilience.
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Understanding HRV and Managing Stress with Matt Bennett
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about stress and, in some aspect, our response to stress, because that’s one of the things that can really get in the way of us following our passions, and you can easily ruin a good reputation you built with one terrible stress response and that’s something that is really sad to see because we all are human and we all have the times where we don’t quite respond the right way but it can be a little bit difficult. So, one of the tools that a lot of people are using to manage their stress as well as their overall health is HRV which, my guest today, Matt Bennett, the owner and founder of Optimal HRV, is going to talk to us more about.
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HRV is the heart rate variability and, Matt, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show so it’s an honor to be on.
Thank you so much for coming on and I want to start off with explaining to the audience to make sure we’re all oriented, I know some people are probably pretty familiar with what HRV is, others maybe not as much, but I think most people probably aren’t familiar with it and its significance on the level that you are.
Really, when you get down to what is heart rate variability, it’s your body and mind’s ability to handle or recover from stress. And, as you said in your intro, the stress response is so fundamental to everything we do. Now, stress can be an illness. Stress can be a very, very difficult workout. Stress is often you talk about on your show, can be, I’ve got five, six hours of screen time today and we know that can add stress to the system as well.
Now, we’re doing that by measuring millisecond variations in your heartbeat, and I’m happy to explore the science behind that, but that gives us, I think, a good working definition to start out our conversation with.
So you’re talking about like millisecond variance in heart rate and some people might be thinking why there should be variance at all because one of the key aspects of it that might be good to orient people to is that is there a too low, a too high number, or is it just a matter of keeping it at or above a certain level?
Right. So, we’re in a time where consistency is usually leading to a good outcome. You and I want to turn our computers on and, for the most part, we want it to do the same thing it did yesterday and the day before. You don’t want to sit in your car and have it operate totally different than it did the last time you drove it. In this high tech environment, mechanized environment that we modern humans live in, consistency is usually equated with good quality. We are biological systems so this variation is actually a positive thing. Now, you could have variation in your heartbeats to an extent where you have a medical issue, arrhythmias and other things are obviously not what we’re talking about here and those need to be addressed with your medical provider. Those are usually bigger variations, though, so those are sort of we can put those aside because really not what we’re looking at with heart rate variability. So, we’re looking at, because the heart rate modulates with every inhale and exhale, and when we inhale, our heart rate goes up slightly. When we exhale, the heart rate goes down slightly. And so the more fluctuation we have there, you can think about this as flexibility, though, really, what we’re showing is the better we’re regulated from a stress perspective, the more we have our prefrontal cortex or executive functions available to us. So it is a really great biometric to show, if you think about executive functioning, cognitive functioning, emotional regulation, we’re emotionally regulated, we’re going to be better socially but also drops in heart rate variability because higher is better predicts a lot of chronic diseases. People were paying attention to it during COVID because it was an early indicator before symptoms. I would say 10 out of the 10 leading causes of death, the car accident one is the one that’s hard to measure with HRV, so nine out of the 10 are shown to, early on and throughout the course of the disease, see very, very significant dips in heart rate variability.
So, I just want to make sure that we develop this foundation, this orientation that when you’re talking about heart rate variability, you’re not talking about how your heart rate goes up when you have a stressor response. So let’s say you have someone says something that triggers a traumatic memory and your heart rate starts going up because your subconscious memories start anticipating some sort of bad result, that fight, flight, freeze response, that’s not what you’re talking about. What we’re talking about with heart rate variability is that breathe in and breathe out.
Well, yes and, because if you think about somebody experiencing, let’s just say, a minor stressor, because we’ll see this exaggerated with a fight, flight, or freeze response, for sure, but we know as cortisol levels or the stress hormone levels increase, our heart rate increases as well, so you don’t need an advanced degree in mathematics to know if you have more heart beats per second, the room for variation decreases just naturally. We get stress and our heart rate increases, heart rate variability is going to decrease dramatically.
During something that may trigger, whether it’s just a stress response or a re-traumatization, we’re going to see more significant increases in heart rate, more significant decreases in HRV. So those are intertwined. Share on XThere is an interesting exception to the rule where you could have a low resting heart rate but there still could be very little variation there as well. So it’s not always due to increases or decreases in heart rate. So, we are measuring –– and this is where heart rate variability is a much more sensitive and much more effective biometric for the stress response than heart rate alone.
I see. So, when we talk about the stress response, that’s like kind of an acute reduction in heart rate variability, whereas if we talk about someone that’s generally unhealthy for the variety of reasons that people can be unhealthy, both physically and emotionally, and they can have a chronically low heart rate variability.
So you think about something like burnout, for example, that is usually not something that you’ll experience at 1 PM this afternoon but then be totally healthy again at 3 PM this afternoon. It’s something longer term. So we’ll see HRV baselines dip for significant periods of time until that burnout is addressed. Same thing that if you have one of those big events, we can measure that acutely as well. So this is where it becomes such a powerful metric of overall health and wellness.
And then can HRV be too high?
Yes, but is it worth really talking about those small, small exceptions? Not really. Arrhythmias, for example, can cause that. There may be a handful of others that the research may point to. Bulimia, this is kind of the detail we have to get in. Folks that struggle with bulimia have higher heart rate variabilities. Obviously, that’s not a healthy sort of diagnosis to have so maybe because of the forced vomiting, we may see more vagal stimulation, but, as you see, we got to get lost in the weeds to get there. So, too high, maybe a percentage of 1 percent of the population really need to be concerned with your HRV is too high. The rest of us, we want our HRV to be high.
I see. So it’s like the inverse of sodium intake, where it can be too low but it’s such a small amount and the real issue in our culture is, in that case, too high, but here it’s too low. And so when someone has a chronically low heart rate variability, does that show up in people’s daily lives, whether it be stress responses or anything else?
A variety of different ways. We will see increases as HRV can be a predictor of a range of chronic diseases, so chronic pain, chronic fatigue, things like diabetes, those sort of things. So we can talk about a range of medical health issues associated with, again, chronic, long-term low HRV. Mental health issues as well, anxiety, depression, PTSD has been highly, as you talk about, trauma as well. Burnout. Long COVID is something that’s being studied because HRV gives you a great metric of recovery from that as well. So, chronic disease or a chronic mental health condition, that’s going to really impact your nervous system and that’s going to show up in your heart rate variability. Regardless, the good thing is we get this baseline so if you start a new treatment, start building new, healthier habits, that’s where we should see heart rate variability start to increase that baseline over time.
So if someone starts a workout routine or just, I’m gonna, like, I don’t know, just drink less.
Anybody cares about heart rate variability, one of the first things you realize is what alcohol does to your nervous system. And, spoiler alert, it’s not healthy for you.
Oh, I thought it was.
We were sold that. I want to go back to the reality where two drinks for you and I would be healthy. That’s, unfortunately –– if you look at who sponsored those research studies, you’ll find out maybe what was behind some of those findings.
And then, when it comes to connection with certain chronic diseases, how often is an HRV measurement able to detect a chronic disease. What is your probability of detection and false alarm rate on this?
So it’s going to give you an early warning. HRV is a very sensitive, very powerful metric for overall health and wellness. So, for example, if you see a three- or four-day significant drop in your heart rate variability, it’s kind of like that yellow, the stop light has turned to yellow. And it gives people a “What’s going on here?” Maybe I’m getting burned out at work. Maybe I have got a virus in my body that maybe I don’t have the sniffles yet or the cough, but my body’s fighting something off. So, one of the things it does, it gives us that early warning that –– and this is where I find it so powerful, I need to pay attention to this. That may be more breaks at work, that may be, I know one of my biggest HRV boosters is trying to get a three-day weekend in from time to time when I see those dips, so something’s going on, I may not want to go to the gym and push myself today. I might want to see, hey, can I check out a little early? Can I focus on sleep? Can I eat a good anti-inflammatory dinner and really paying attention to getting it back in recovery. Where we see things with chronic diseases, there’s nothing about HRV that’s going to say, “Hey, you’re in prediabetes right now.” It’s going to say, “Hey, something is going on where your nervous system is really struggling right now,” and if you see that drop continue and you start to feel different, because the subjective is still important here, that’s where you may want to go see your medical provider if some of your regular recovery skills aren’t getting that back up. Most chronic diseases happen over time. It gives you plenty of early warning that’s something is not right.
So you’re saying like the common experience is that you see that your HRV dropped, for one reason or another, and you just take a day to rest, have a really healthy eating day, or do some meditation, whatever it is, and you bring it back, but then when you’re unable to bring it back through those standard techniques, that’s when it starts to become, okay, here’s a warning sign that something bigger needs to be addressed, but that something is still something you need to figure out.
Yeah. And, a lot of times, we can. I love to snowboard. I had my cousin come in for four days. Boy, all of a sudden, I’m snowboarding with somebody who wants to go from opening to closing. Fifty-year-old Matt, he likes about a four-hour day, now I’m doing six-hour days, I can see that drop, but I know why that is dropping, so I can say, hey, maybe you’re doing a big sprint at work, so you see that so if you can connect the why this is happening, it does give you insight to the impact it’s having on you and then, hopefully, that’s a short-term situation where you can say, okay, now that my cousin flew back to Indiana, I need to have a couple of recovery days where, yeah, I might go for a long walk but I’m not going to go push myself because that’s when I know injuries and illnesses can creep in if I’m not careful.
Now, for people who are worried about that stress response aspect, for people who are just worried that, okay, someone’s going to trigger me, let’s say you’re going to a setting where you know a person there might be someone that you kind of struggle with in one way or another. Does this HRV show you like kind of when you need to watch out for that?
It does, absolutely. It can be very predictive. So if you think about what stresses us out, on one hand it could be things that just happen to us, could be things that are happening right now in the present or it could be some dread or anxiety about the future, all those can create negative or distress for us. So, yeah, if I know I’m going into a really difficult meeting today with somebody who’s triggering me, that will likely show up in our HRV scores, even if we’re taking right when we get out of bed, we’re taking our morning reading, we’re looking at our HRV, the meeting might not be until the afternoon but it already might be showing up in our data. It may have disrupted our sleep quality. All these things can contribute to that. So, it is a predictive thing. Again, if I’m stressed out presently because of a future potential, it absolutely can show up in your HRV as well.
And then, of course, the likelihood that you are going to snap or whatever you want to call it, something to watch out for.
We can’t underestimate that, hey, I know I’m struggling right now, and, usually, like you said, you do this for a while, you can identify what you’re struggling with, just that awareness and mindfulness to go into the situation, understanding that, hey, I need to pay special attention and, hopefully, there’s some coping skills you have to carry into before that meeting and during that meeting to keep yourself regulated as best as possible.
Now, what do most people do with respect to monitoring HRV? I assume it’s something they measure in like a standard physical doctor’s exam but, beyond that, what’s the typical person right now doing?
Oh, I wish they measured it in a doctor’s exam. Actually, the medical community has not yet adopted HRV as a vital sign.
Oh, really?
Yes. And part of that is, and this is just the limitation of all vital signs, is you show up to a very artificial environment for most of us, hopefully for most of us, which is a doctor’s office. Hopefully, you’re not there as part of your daily routine or, obviously, you’re struggling with really severe medical issues. So, as I like to say, they take your blood pressure, they’re kind of measuring the stress response of your commute. Did you wait longer than you had? I mean, it’s so time specific. You’re measuring a specific state in an artificial environment that even if you did measure HRV, I think you should, but does it tell you a ton if you don’t measure it three or six months later? It’s only giving you a little bit of a snapshot. Where we really want to integrate this is taking it every day and this is the really exciting thing about where the science has come is that it used to be I had to go to a doctor’s office or, really, a laboratory setting with an advanced EKG machine, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. You got hooked up, again, in a very artificial setting, and you had to go to a laboratory to get it done. So it was used in research as the gold standard for the stress response, really, beginning in the 1960s being that gold standard but not accessible in any functional way for you or I. Now, a lot of people, if you got a fancy Apple Watch or other higher end watch, you may get your HRV scores each and every day. We could argue about the positives or negatives about how Apple does heart rate variability or others. I think if a watch does a thousand different things, how much do they prioritize HRV accuracy? I think the answer to that is it varies. We really encourage like things like Polar straps or Optimal HRV, we sell an accurate device that just slips over your wrist that’s really dedicated just to tracking heart rate variability and the only thing it’s focused on is accuracy. We encourage folks that use our app to get up in the morning, put that device on, take a three-minute reading, you’ve got really good information on the state of your nervous system as you start the day. Now, what you want to compare that to is your other averages. How are you doing this week? How are you doing this month? And HRV can give you really good insight into those answers. So really getting up each morning, taking that reading, really where we need to get and where a lot of progressive healthcare providers are getting is let’s get them that data so they can see HRV trends over time and now we have a whole new insight to what’s going on underneath your skin, whether that’s treating a chronic disease, whether that’s to maximize your performance at work or athletically. We have more data than we could have ever dreamed of just a few years ago.
So it’s not as useful as like your cholesterol reading, where you can actually show a trend, and I know for a fact that they do the cholesterol stuff.
I just got some lab results done for insurance, those one-time markers are probably going to be consistent for weeks at a time. I could drastically change how I eat and those would be effective over time, but they’re relatively stable markers, whereas heart rate variability, how are you doing right now managing stress, you may have had a hard day yesterday and had a really good day today. If yesterday was a great day for you but normally you’re struggling, it can give a little bit of a false indicator with this, but it’s more and more wearable devices are out there. Again, if we’re tracking this every day, then your healthcare provider, if they know what they’re looking at, can get a remarkable amount of insight into your health, overall health and wellness.
And what made you determine that first thing in the morning was the right time to do this measurement?
One is I love to build healthy habits. So, if you could put your device on your phone or your alarm clock, I’m more likely for you to take a reading. And in the morning, my argument would be is there’s less variables that have hit you throughout the day. However, if you want to take it the last thing before you go to bed each and every night, great. We want consistency of time. That’s what we want. So if you take it at lunch every day, okay, take it at lunch every day. I find, one, it’s easier to build a habit and, really, there’s less things that have hit you throughout the day when you first wake up so it gives you a really good, clean piece of data that, over time, you can really use to track health and wellness. Now, you can take HRV as many other times throughout the day as you want. You may want to pre- and post-test mindfulness. If you’re going to do some doom scrolling like I know you encourage people not to, take it before you do that and then two hours after you’ve been scrolling through Instagram, take it again, and we will prove everything you preach around this topic and what it does to your nervous system. So, you can take as many readings as you want throughout the day. We really challenge people to have one consistent time, whether that be first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and that really gives you your baseline over time of overall health and wellness and then, again, as a separate data set, take as many readings as you want, but let’s keep that one time a day kind of as your overall measure of health and wellness over time.
So you’re saying consistency is the most important, most likely first in the morning because, really, the only bad thing that could be affecting is if you had a nightmare or had like a terrible dream.
And you probably know this as well and a lot of your listeners, the quality of your sleep is such a huge determinant of the health of your nervous system throughout the day. You’re absolutely correct, and yet, taking that into account, if you had a terrible night of sleep, you’re going to have less energy, your nervous system, you talk about that person that might trigger you, you might be much more likely to be triggered after a bad night of sleep than a really good night of sleep. So, even though that will impact your heart rate variability, great, it should. And, again, it’ll just alert you to the fact that, yeah, I didn’t think I slept very well, my HRV is 20 percent below what it normally is, I need to be strategic about how I approach the day today.
Yeah. And I mean, it could be bad sleep or, as you alluded to before, it could be that you have a, I don’t know, a virus onset going on, right?
Absolutely.
Some situations could even be like anxiety about the day to come if you have like a really important, let’s say you have an investor presentation going on at 10 or 11 in the morning, you could have that stress response showing up first thing even if you slept fine.
But, again, you may be telling yourself, “Oh, I’m fine,” your HRV is going to give you quantitative, objective data. We always encourage people to take that with your subjective experience of how you’re doing. We don’t want to discount the subjective part of it. Bring that into this as well, and maybe, hey, if you got a big presentation at 11 o’clock, I do a lot of keynote speaking and trainings, I will take my HRV but not look at the results, because I can psych myself out. I’ll take it, I want the data, but I don’t want the data right now. I’ll look at it in the evening and just kind of see, I’ve proven myself I can perform well for short bursts of time even with a low HRV, because between flying, time zone changes, I know sometimes going into trainings, I can’t get in my optimal state but I know I can still show up and knock it out the park. So I’ll take the data to be interested in it but I won’t look at until later on.
You mentioned how Optimal, you have the device you put on your wrist to measure your HRV, and, obviously, people take it home and it’s up to them to determine how to use it. What are the other offerings of Optimal HRV?
So one of the big ones is HRV biofeedback. This is the ultimate cheat code for your heart rate variability. So we also know, and this is just right there connected, locked into the science around –– HRV is a measure, again, of your body’s ability to handle or recover from stress. We know that we all have a unique breathing rate. We call this your resonance frequency breathing rate. And for adults, it’s anywhere from seven breaths per minute to 3.5 breaths per minute. Now, I want to be very clear about this ideal breathing rate for training. So you don’t want to breathe at this rate 24/7. It’s like if you want to build strong biceps, you’re not going to carry around dumbbells with you 24/7 doing curls or very quickly you will injure yourself. We’re not talking about a breathing rate that you want to do 24/7, I want to be very clear about that. But, for example, mine is 4.5 breaths per minute. So what we do is we help you establish that breathing rate and then we give you exercises, HRV biofeedback, to breathe at that rate and see how it’s impacting your nervous system. So, this is like for your big biceps going to the gym where mindfulness might be going to gym, mindfulness with HRV, resonance frequency breathing, for lack of a better analogy, is like going to the gym on steroids, without all the bad side effects to steroids. So you’re really maximizing your breathing, your mindfulness practice. We have a bunch of guided meditations and self-compassion activities you can play over that as an audio clip but you’re really building that over time. So let’s go back to your example, if we can, hey, I know I’ve got this meeting this afternoon with my teammate that triggers me all the time. Well, I got my HRV, I can see that, yeah, I’m getting a little anxious about this meeting. Well, before the meeting, maybe I just go into the stall in the bathroom and do a five-minute resonance frequency breathing. I know I’m really getting my parasympathetic ventral vagal on board building that emotional regulation, I do that, I go into the meeting in a much better state than if I just walked in jumping out of the emails and the phone calls and everything else I was doing, I may enter that meeting in a much better space if I take five minutes to get regulated. So, this is where we challenge people to create a practice around this, try to bring this into your everyday routine of trying to get time each and every day to practice resonance frequency breathing, and what we’ll see is your baseline HRV scores, like I said, it’s a great cheat code, healthy sleep, nutrition. Movement is also playing in there but to improve overall HRV over time as well.
I see. So, you’re talking about not just the tools to monitor it but also tools to improve it long term.
Absolutely.
Listening to this conversation, if anyone is interested in any of these products, what will be the best way to have anyone reach you?
Yep, so OptimalHRV, all one word, dot com. Make it easy for folks. So you can put Matt@optimalhrv.com to get to my email personally. So, yeah, that’s the best way to find out about us as well. And one of our missions is HRV for everybody. I’ve worked with a lot of populations experiencing homelessness, poverty, unemployment, where a $450 phone or a $400 annual membership just out of their reach so our device is as low as 35 bucks and then an annual membership is 65 bucks a year. So we really try to make, if you’re interested in this, that there’s a really good price point, you don’t have to make six figures a year to bring this on board into your wellness, resiliency routine.
A common situation that I hear from people who build businesses of all kinds is that you go online, you look at the reviews, and you see 10 good ones and then you see that one negative one. So, just situations like that where people can respond better and be more likely to get into your parasympathetic nervous system and say, “Okay, my product was not for that one person but these other people really liked it and I of just need to move on.”
I would love to have nine good reviews for one bad but people don’t read what you put out there, like you need a device to use our app, which we throw everywhere. So what do we get? One-star reviews because they’re upset that they need a device, even though we told them they needed a device. So this is the things that frustrate the heck out of you because you get these bad reviews even though you tried to do everything correctly and your tech didn’t work for a big client and this, that, and the other that happens and now there’s, I don’t know, have we gone to 100 percent, 120 percent tariffs on China this week where we do manufacture our devices? All this stuff is going on. To have that time to breathe is so important. For me as a as a tech entrepreneur, as somebody who has run businesses all my life, if you get overwhelmed by one thing, you’re going to perform miserably on the next three things that are probably in your calendar already. We just concluded March Madness and we’re going into the NBA Playoffs. My HRV biofeedback probably is like shooting free throws. Being a basketball player, I shot probably a million plus free throws. It’s boring. Do I get excited to practice my biofeedback every morning and every night before I go to bed? No, I don’t. It doesn’t juice me up. I’d rather watch another episode of whatever I’m watching on Netflix or whatever it is, get to my emails earlier. But what I know over time, just like practicing free throws, I’m building a skill. Every day. I’m building a skill. I shot those million free throws because when things got stressful, like that meeting you mentioned, and things are on the line and my team’s depending on me, I’ve already built the skill set to step up to the free throw line or to give a presentation and succeed, to step up there. So, again, if you think about how your body handles and your mind handles or recovers from stress, not only, again, will HRV tracking give you insight to that, but, man, as somebody who practiced mindfulness 10 years before integrating HRV biofeedback, HRV biofeedback just gives you kind of this superpower to say, “Yeah, everything’s going wrong today but I’m gonna do a few resonance frequency breaths and I’ve got this next opportunity right in front of me, I’m gonna go into that in the best state possible to do.” So, again, when things get stressed, we can step up to the line and knock those shots down when they count the most.
Yeah. And then what made you decide in your personal journey that HRV, HRV measurement, HRV management, improvement was going to be the mission you’re going to dedicate your time and energy to?
Stubbornness I think would be the best to answer to that question. So, as I mentioned, I got kind of a dual background. I have a Master’s in Counseling Psychology, started my career out being a therapist for youth in the foster care system, homelessness, moved into more of a leadership position around after school programming, residential child welfare ,so the most traumatized folks in our population, those were my clients, and I was always frustrated that I couldn’t measure was my intervention helping or not. Because, as a therapist, you quickly learn what may work for one client doesn’t work nearly as well for the next and may actually harm the next person, not intentionally, but it’s just not working for that individual. And I love to quantify things and so I didn’t have the ability to quantify, we know trauma disrupts the nervous system and devastating in, if I don’t get treatment, potentially lifelong ways, including taking 20 years off people’s lives. And with the stakes so high, was my intervention really helping them out? The other part of my kind of brain is I got an MBA as well along the way so I’ve always thought about staff health and wellness and leadership as well. And so whether, one, I wanted data that I could do clinically, but how’s my workforce doing today? How’s my team doing today? I think that that could be –– should be a real powerful metric of leadership is where’s my team’s HRV this morning? How are we doing creating a good environment? So, those two things I’ve always been frustrated with. I couldn’t quantify staff health and wellness, group health and wellness, or those clinical outcomes, so about six years ago, I did a deep dive into existing platforms. Most initial HRV focus was on elite athletes. You may find a professional athlete who’s not tracking HRV but I think it would be very difficult to do so. They were the early adopters, really looking at physical stress, because, again, it’s another stressor added on to their body. And so those were either way too expensive or just the language had no connection to the mental health side of things, and then they were often $400, $500 a year or more to integrate those in. There also wasn’t a big scientific focus at the time, where people would give you an energy score but not tell you how they got the energy score. And so when I’m working with individuals that have suicidal thoughts or might be at risk for relapse, I can’t play around with that. I tried to bring in existing tech to it and nothing was able for me to take to the people that I worked with, whether I was training, whether I was doing consulting, there wasn’t a solution out there. I also wanted the clinicians to get the information too and that oftentimes boosted the cost into the thousands of dollars a year making it impractical to implement. So, I knew one friend in tech and I asked him, “Hey, I have this idea. I don’t really wanna do it but nobody else is doing it,” and he didn’t think I was totally nuts, and so my good friend Jeff Summers and I created Optimal HRV initially just for tracking and then one of the greatest phone calls of my life, Dr Inna Khazan from Harvard Medical School, who is really the world expert in HRV biofeedback, joined the team about a year in so we started out with the tracking and then utilized her science to bring in the biofeedback aspect of it as well. And we’re shoe stringing, we’re scrappy, we’re very responsive, and it’s been a unique journey for a therapist to now be running a tech company. It’s a pretty big evolution in my own career as well.
Well, so you started out as a therapist but also got an MBA.
Yes.
When you decided to do both of those things, did you know that in some way you were going to combine them the way you combine them now and saying, “Okay, I understand the psychology, I want this measurement thing, but I also want to apply it to like how businesses are run”?
If I was only that smart. Honestly, I got promoted six months into my career because I love this stuff. I have a huge amount of passion for the work that I do. So, I was six months in, I was all of a sudden managing people. I was being trained as a therapist at the time because I was going to get my initial master’s in counseling psych, so the only skill I had to be a manager was to do therapy with my staff, which is an effective management so, I mean, I’d love to say it was that sophisticated but I had no idea what I was doing. And in the nonprofit world at the time where I was, I didn’t have a whole lot of great role models to say, “Okay, this person knows how to do this,” so I fell in love with leadership, I wanted to do more of it, and I was solving every problem in my 20s with another graduate degree and more student loan debt. So, I wanted to be a better leader with that because I kind of saw that this was how I could impact more people was to lead, create healthy organizations, healthy programs. It wasn’t until 18 years later until I even heard about heart rate variability. So there was a big gap in there, even though I’ve always been a nerd around quality and quantifying outcomes. So, the writing was on the wall but there wasn’t any kind of insight as far as I was concerned.
And did you get any feedback from anyone about, okay, like, well, you’re a therapist, you’re a psychologist, why are you getting an MBA? What does this have to do with anything? Stay in your lane, that type of stuff.
At the time, like I said, six months in, I was a manager, and I still had a foot in the clinical world, a foot in the –– so I was still holding on the clinical side of it, but I was there. So, now, the University of Colorado, Denver, somehow I snuck in the back door through their executive MBA program at like age 24, I don’t know, a lot smarter people have been turned away from that program, they needed a warm body in the seat is all I could explain. So, all of a sudden, at 24 with a couple years of experience, I was sitting in my small group with CEOs of large healthcare firms, VPs of health systems, and so I got lucky, to be honest, again, that program, but I was already in that world so I just wanted to be better at that world. So I had already kind of made that shift. And then staying in the nonprofit realm, an MBA was several degrees of leadership training above what a normal nonprofit leader ever could dream of getting so it really escalated my career very quickly. Instead of, “Why did you do this?” it’s like, “Oh, wait a minute, we’ve got somebody trained to be a leader.” So, all of a sudden, my career advanced 10 or 15, 20 years. I was in rooms in my 20s with people who were there and why are you in this room? I guess I got this degree. So that was more of the justification I had to do later on. Who’s this young punk sitting in these meetings? And I learned if anybody wants advice, if you know you’re not the smartest person in the room, you listen, you ask good questions. People love to talk about, especially those who think they’re the smartest people in the room, so I was eventually embraced with that one coping skill that has served me well over the years.
And is there an element of it about shooting above where people think you’re supposed to go? The question I often hear people kind of ask themselves, a version of it is, “Who am I?” like who am I to become blank, whether it is like I’m going to apply for a C-level job, even though I don’t have any experience, but at some point, you need to kind of jump those levels, which sounds like what you did in that particular instance.
I’ve never really had impostor syndrome. Maybe it’s being an athlete where I always thought, I walked into any basketball court and thought I’m the best player on this court, whether I was or not. If you don’t go in with that mentality, why are you there? And so whatever it was, I’ll give my parents some credit for it. I was humble but, at the same time, if I didn’t feel like maybe I wasn’t the best person in the world to give this specific talk on this specific subject, I would work my butt off to be that person, and that served me well during my career. Though, I acknowledge that there’s a lot of privilege behind that statement, and a lot of doors that, even if they weren’t thrown open for me, weren’t closed for me as well. So I just never had that. I always looked at things as challenges. So what business do I have going and starting a tech company? None, but a whole lot of passion, seeing a need to help people has always been my big motivator in my career as I thought I could really help a lot of people doing this, and then being able to know that, hey, I can’t do this without somebody who knows how to scale tech companies. So my friend Jeff, who started the company with me, he was that person, and then bringing in Dr Inna Khazan, who’s the world expert HRV biofeedback, she’s that person. The rest of my team feel those different areas and I’m their student. Even though I’m in charge, technically, I’m learning from them about their expertise moving forward. So that’s been –– one is humility and two is looking at, where I think impostor syndrome creeps in for a lot of people, I see that as a challenge and, again, I want to acknowledge there can be a lot behind that statement to do with my privilege and being in this body may attribute for a lot of that as well.
And for anyone that is dealing with impostor syndrome right now, for the person that’s listening out there who may be afraid to take that leap, maybe asking that question, “Who am I?” and the people that are like type out the email and then they’re about to click Send and they stop and they delete it, all those types of ways it shows up, what would you say to anyone to, I don’t know, get them through it or get them to contextualize it properly?
I guess my best piece of advice is try to fail strategically. Share on XFor every success and breakthrough that I’ve had in my career, whether that be public speaking, whether that be being in, you know, the C suite and large nonprofits, way before I was probably honestly mature enough to actually be there, is that, hey, I’m going to apply for this job, it’s people interviewing me who’s going to decide whether I’m good enough, and if I get that big keynote speech, especially as I talk about trauma, the brain, the nervous system, I always think about like, okay, there’s going to be a world expert neuroscientist sitting in the back somewhere, whether they do or not, which usually they don’t, I want my presentation to speak to somebody who’s brand new to this topic but engage that world class expert as well. And what that means for me is not only researching the heck out of my topic and building that expertise but also practicing over and over –– public speaking, I think, is a lot sometimes of practice. People don’t realize, even today, if you ask me to talk about staff health and wellness, which I’ve probably given a thousand, if not ten thousand talks on in my career, I’m going to practice for a week leading up to whether it’s a four-day talk on the topic or a four-hour talk or a four-minute talk, I’m going to be rehearsing that for a week ahead of time. Even with my 10,000, 20,000 hours already in the bank of focused intentional practice, I’m still going to do that.
So, being very realistic as you are taking a risk, and I’ve done dozens of things over my career that just haven’t been incredibly successful, that if I fail at something, I’m not totally all in where I lose my house, and so managing those risks the best you can, I think we idealize the person that seems to forsake everything else to start their business and goes into hundreds of thousands of dollars of credit card debt and we hear about the stories where that pays off. For every story that where that pays off, we know, statistically, there’s hundreds of ones that, I guess, lose their home and go bankrupt, which, luckily, in our society, you can still go bankrupt and bounce back. But just, again, manage. If you try something new, do a workshop instead of quitting your job and trying to become a full trainer without having one gig lined up. Being very strategic about that.
So, yeah, so it sounds like be strategic, be well prepared, do your work, which kind of does for everything, and then also like contextualize the worst case scenario because there’s a big difference between the worst case scenario being you lose your house and your home and the worst case scenario being you suffer through like five minutes embarrassment and then you go home and you have to cry again.
Maybe learn from the embarrassment. You can also learn from the bankruptcy as well, but one is different than the other, and usually what I find is, if you’re prepared, there could be that person in the audience who does bash you, but it’s going to be less likely. And then you’ve got, like you said, if you got nine great reviews and one bad review, learn from the bad review but then practice some HRV biofeedback, get over it and bring that learning into your next attempt to be even better. That growth mindset has been so fundamental to my approaches. Okay, I’ll take it, and my trainings now are based on both the positive feedback I’ve gotten over the years but also some of the critical feedback as well and I’m always adapting. As I will tell you, I never do the same presentation twice, because if I don’t learn anything, then I’m going to get stagnant and I get bored with that pretty quickly.
Yeah. Well, there’s some wonderful advice for people who are looking to level up. I’m sure so many out there listening are. I mean, that’s why people tune in. Matt, I’d like to thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling a bit about your story, bringing your passion and observation as well as understanding of yourself, because I think a big part of it is that you were looking at what you were doing in your initial therapy, seeing that it’s not like a measurable one size fits all, it’s more of a you have to figure out what works for this person, it’s going to be different for that person, and there are some great therapists out there that deal with that reality pretty well but your reality needed to be something a little bit different and then you found the HRV and Optimal HRV.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s been an amazing journey. I can never predict what’s going to happen tomorrow but I think if you’re an entrepreneur listening to this, you have to find some joy in that. If you want stability, don’t start your own business. If you want variety, if you want to be pivoting every other day and looking for the next opportunity, it’s a life well lived, with acknowledging that it’s not always easy but, man, I find it totally enjoyable and getting to meet and talk to people like yourself is part of the joyful journey of finding like-minded people who also have a passion for this. So it’s a great life if you can manage your stress along the way.
Yeah. And I would also like to thank everybody out there listening and, hopefully, you out there can find the joyful life the way what it means for you.
Important Links:
- Optimal HRV
Matt on LinkedIn - Contact Matt at matt@optimalhrv.com
About Matt Bennett
Matt Bennett is a founder of Optimal HRV (optimalhrv.com) and president of the nonprofit, Optimal Innovation Group (optimalinnovationgroup.org). Matt’s passion manifests in his books, including his most recent publications, Heart Rate Variability: The Future of Trauma-Informed Care and The Heart(beat) of Business as well as his Heart Rate Variability Podcast. Matt combines his masters’ degrees in psychology and business administration with his practical experience as a therapist and leader to develop research-based solutions and trainings to improve the health of individuals, staff, organizations, and systems.