Feminine Biohacking for Burnout with Angela Foster

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, I am joined by the lovely Angela Foster, who is an award winning nutritionist, health & performance coach, speaker and host of the High Performance Health podcast. Angela shares with us how she overcame burnout, depression, and viral & bacterial pneumonia by using biohacking, holistic health and spiritual practices. I think you'll be surprised and inspired by her journey! 

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• What is psychoneuroimmunology?
• What is biosyncing?
• Nervous system insights
• Heart Rate Variability (HRT) what it is and what it measures
• 1/3 of your HRT is based on your genetics
• Feminine version of biohacking

ABOUT GUEST:
Angela Foster is an award winning Nutritionist, Health & Performance Coach, Speaker and Host of the top rated global podcast, High Performance Health. She is also the creator of BioSyncing® a unique program designed specifically for women who want to optimize every aspect of their physical, mental and spiritual health for high performance in business and life.
As a former partner in a large law firm, Angela is no stranger to the demands of long working hours and a high-pressure environment. Angela left the world of corporate law after a serious illness in 2014 and used integrative health practices and biohacking to rebuild her physical, mental and spiritual health. After working with thousands of women, Angela has found that optimal health is the foundation of high performance.
When going on her own health journey, Angela struggled to find all of the information she needed in one place. With so much information it felt confusing and overwhelming. So in 2022, Angela launched her women’s biohacking membership, The Female Biohacker Collective, to give you the Health Coach in your pocket.
The Female Biohacker Collective is an exclusive community of women and provides you with the latest science, biohacks and expert tools you need to step into your most empowered future self by embracing and syncing with your female physiology.

For the free health score Angela talked about in this episode, click here.

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://angelafosterperformance.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/angelasfoster/
Podcast: High Performance Health

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

SPONSORS:
A special thank you to Christian Healthcare Ministries for sponsoring this episode. Check them out here: https://chministries.org/lessstressedlife

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Angela Foster: If you really want to have true high performance in life, in terms of longevity in your business, in your relationships with your family, friends, and most importantly, with yourself, then health is the foundation because it is that pillar, isn't it? It's the store with, if that leg goes, nothing else will stand up.

[00:00:16] Christa Biegler: Stress is the inflammation that robs us of life, energy, and happiness. Our typical solutions for gut health and hormone balance have let a lot of us down. We're over medicated and underserved. At The Less Stressed Life, we're a community of health savvy women exploring solutions outside of our traditional Western medicine toolbox and training to raise the bar and change our stories.

[00:00:42] Christa Biegler: Each week, our hope is that you leave our sessions inspired to learn, grow, and share these stories to raise the bar in your life and home. 

[00:01:00] Christa Biegler: Today on the less stressed life. I have Angela Foster. Angela is a high health and performance coach nutritionist and founder of the female biohacker collective and host of the high performance health podcast as a former partner in a large law firm. She's no stranger to the demands of long hours and the challenges women face in combining high performance with family life while still optimizing their health and longevity after suffering from burnout and major depressive disorder.

[00:01:26] Christa Biegler: Culminating in a life threatening battle with pneumonia, she used biohacking, holistic health and spiritual practices to regain her health. So we're going to talk a little bit about that today and what's kind of coming to the forefront for the most important things in longevity and health. Welcome to the show, Angela.

[00:01:45] Angela Foster: Thank you. It's great to be here. 

[00:01:47] Christa Biegler: Yeah, and I'm so excited to be graced by your amazing British accent for this as well as my favorite. So I always think that my favorite place to start is your story a little bit. And I know in notes I have for at some point, I'd love for you to tell the story about kind of that breaking point in your career and coming off of antipsychotic and antidepressant medications and side effects, which is a pretty loaded topic, but that's I wanted you to include that when you tell us your story a little bit and kind of how you ended up in the holistic health space.

[00:02:19] Angela Foster: Yeah, sure. So as you said, and sort of the bio, when you were reading my bio, I was a corporate lawyer for many years and in corporate law it's like all nighters, weekends, just kind of burning the candle at both ends, sacrificing sleep, all the things that you and I talk about that people should be prioritizing don't really get prioritized.

[00:02:36] Angela Foster: And I think that really set the stage in terms of adrenal function, I was having problems with my hormones. I was ignoring the signs of repeated chest infections and things, I'd had pleurisy, bronchitis, all these things going on. And then when I was eight months pregnant, I made partner with, well, eight months pregnant with my first child.

[00:02:52] Angela Foster: I made partnership and then I went on to have my second son within sort of the space of that 12 month maternity leave, I was three months pregnant. So everything was kind of happening quite quickly. I was surprised. I didn't expect to have problems with my mental health. I didn't think I was someone who, it wasn't on my radar that I might suffer with postnatal depression.

[00:03:10] Angela Foster: But I did suffer really. But like, I was really challenged by it on the first and second pregnancy, but it was after my third pregnancy that became really entrenched, even though between my second and third child, I'd really worked on myself and really tried to kind of done a lot of psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy to reprogram my thoughts and things.

[00:03:30] Angela Foster: I'd got a maternity nurse in to make sure I was getting more sleep, all the things that, the medical team were advising I do to try and protect myself. But that third time I just kind of fell harder with it and faster. And I think we can talk about some of that and the sort of neurological patterns that can happen.

[00:03:46] Angela Foster: But that's when it really became entrenched and it was so physical as well as mental. And I got to the point where, my daughter was too, you couldn't really call it postnatal anymore. They were struggling to treat it. I had, repeated thoughts of suicide, not wanting to act on them because I was sort of created this, I felt like there was a prison in my own mind.

[00:04:08] Angela Foster: I didn't want to carry on and didn't want to continue, but I also felt that I didn't want to leave my kids and my husband, behind as the kids whose mom took her own life. So I really didn't know where to go with it. And I was trying I was under psychiatric care, trying all different kinds of medication, including, as you say, psychotics, antipsychotics, should I say alongside antidepressants.

[00:04:29] Angela Foster: And that was for controlling for bipolar episodes, because I would have these incredible periods where I'd be on a, an extreme, almost high. And I would feel like superwoman. I could get everything done. And at first, when these occurred, I thought I was healed, but actually what I realized they were just kind of proceeding this big fall afterwards.

[00:04:46] Angela Foster: And then as they were shifting medications and things around, my kids got flu. I picked it up and that's when it moved into pneumonia. And things just got really bad from there as having scans. They thought I had lung cancer at one point, but it turned out to be viral and bacterial pneumonia. And that's when kind of everything changed right. 

[00:05:05] Christa Biegler: Right. 

[00:05:06] Christa Biegler: I'm imagining you with three young children. I don't know how far apart they are in age, but if they're less than two years, it sounds like for sure there was two of them less than two years apart, which I feel like is a lot to be managing. Plus your, it sounds like you were still in your very highly stressful career at that time.

[00:05:23] Christa Biegler: Is that correct? 

[00:05:25] Angela Foster: Yeah. I took some time. Yeah. I was in the beginning and then I took some time off. I had the three kids. There was three of them within four and a half years. And this was actually against the backdrop of, which we can talk about the reason for those pregnancies being close together was actually because I had PCOS and endometriosis.

[00:05:40] Angela Foster: So it was kind of under, again, medical advice where they, you're trying to solve then it's putting an excess pressure on my body and sort of taking its toll. So they were all very young. And I think that. Obviously it was hard. I don't think I had that recovery period that you should have between pregnancies, particularly when you're having C sections.

[00:06:00] Angela Foster: But I think that with mental health, it's so difficult. And so, it's one of those things that just, it can happen to anyone, right? It doesn't care about culture. It doesn't care about wealth. It doesn't care about nationality. And it hits hard. 

[00:06:14] Christa Biegler: And we do have diagnostic codes for mental health, even though a lot of things get lost between the edges.

[00:06:21] Christa Biegler: But some of the other things you mentioned where you're not really having time to heal, to recover, your adrenals are taking a hit, that is not recognized so much until you are almost dead, right? Like, until you're almost dead, we do not recognize what status, I always tell people when they're frustrated by their medical care.

[00:06:40] Christa Biegler: Your doctors probably has like burned out adrenals as well, because they have a similarly terrible schedule to, you in the law firm, they are, when they're going through med school, they are working and burning candles at both ends. Maybe they're doing that in their career. So role modeling is a problem.

[00:06:55] Christa Biegler: We don't have the overall culture. And I've been really thinking and probably you I know you talk a lot about like syncing life with other things, but I think a lot about, Nature and animals. And the other day, my daughter is watching the chickens go to bed in the backyard. And she said, isn't it funny how nature just knows, like, how do these chickens know that they should go to bed as it becomes dusk.

[00:07:17] Christa Biegler: And we think about the winter and taking rest and all these things that are for a high performing women are not really badges of honor, right? It's like, go. And you get really addicted to this busy ness and then stillness feels extremely uncomfortable, not to go off on a super different tangent, but just some things that, that.

[00:07:35] Christa Biegler: When we're talking about this big topic, I wanted to bring up. So you're on these meds. There's a little bit of a roller coaster there. And another thing that's missed, I wish is that we checked hormones more postpartum because there's certainly a plummet in progesterone, thyroid hormones, et cetera, postpartum.

[00:07:51] Christa Biegler: So you're on these medications. You want to come off of them. Tell us a little bit about how that unfolded because this is kind of king, biggie, messy, and like you said, life threatening. Thank you. 

[00:08:01] Angela Foster: Yeah. So at that point I wasn't coming, I couldn't come off them right. This was a trying to basically control the episodes that were happening and trying to get a handle on some kind of stability.

[00:08:12] Angela Foster: So they were shifting over antidepressant medication from one to another, prescribing antipsychotics, which initially were making me really sedated. But they were sort of surprised by how much I needed. And as you create any kind of shift in medication for anyone that listening and has. Maybe struggled themselves with antidepressant medication is any kind of drop is going to reinvigorate those symptoms of depression again.

[00:08:34] Angela Foster: Right. But it's actually a medical, like a drug withdrawal momentarily, but they had to kind of equalize, get the dose down to be able to shift onto a new one. And that's when I was really struggling with it. And I think that, I had thought so much about how. I wanted to just turn these thoughts off in my head, but I loved my kids.

[00:08:52] Angela Foster: I didn't want to leave them. And I was in such a turmoil. I think almost the universe was like, you know what, here you go kind of thing. Because when I walked back into the doctor's office and they said to me, it's worse than we thought. I just had this CT scan for lung cancer. I knew I had pneumonia. I assumed that then, I had some terrible disease, it turned out it was viral and bacterial pneumonia, but my immune health had dropped so much that I was now neutropenic, which we normally see in, a chemotherapy patient.

[00:09:18] Angela Foster: So I was admitted and I think the thing about being in hospital at that point is I'd spent so long trying to run away from myself and just, and actually physically running. That was something I was doing to try and alleviate the mental health issues. And then you're in hospital. With yourself, away from your family.

[00:09:35] Angela Foster: I couldn't pick them up from school. I couldn't even tell them I was being admitted because it was so kind of urgent at that point. And I finally felt a sense of peace and this just felt okay being me. And at that moment, I felt this overwhelming sense of A, gratitude that I was alive and B, love for my children.

[00:09:54] Angela Foster: And I think that your ability to heal in that situation is transformational. And it certainly was for me. And within 48 hours of me making that decision of like, it was a wake up call. I've got to get well, or my kids are going to grow up without their mom. And it was really about them. My blood work changed.

[00:10:11] Angela Foster: And so my white blood cell count started to come back up, which was key to my recovery because I had viral and bacterial pneumonia. So antibiotics will take you so far. They're not really going to cure a virus. So we needed my immune system on board. And it's funny, isn't it? Because I can see just how, and I know you've experienced that, like how transformational that is and the mental component, how it impacts your physical health.

[00:10:35] Angela Foster: Is it still when I say it, like it still feels extraordinary now, but it's the reality that it can happen just so quickly as well. 

[00:10:45] Christa Biegler: Luckily we've got we've named a field of study for this right, right now, the psychoneuroimmunology, the nervous system informs the immune system. And there's a schematic I use when trying to describe.

[00:10:58] Christa Biegler: People, the steps to take for healing inflammation and overall health. And I think sometimes people are surprised and not surprised that the nervous system makes up at least 50% of it, which is exactly what you're saying. And what I heard from that story was. You had a moment to just stop. You had, life is funny or not funny in the way that if you don't take the smaller messages, the messages would just become more emergency alarms to the point before you know it, you're checked into the hospital.

[00:11:27] Christa Biegler: And what I heard from that was you. We're required to take a pause and focus on yourself instead of absolutely everybody else. And all of a sudden it was like a huge shift in your body. I mean, it was your quote unquote awakening, right? Almost. It sounds like it was. It sounds like this massive turning point.

[00:11:48] Christa Biegler: So I just have to know. So you're in the hospital. All of a sudden, these markers start to change massively as you feel in your nervous system better than what happened, but 

[00:12:00] Angela Foster: when I was admitted and I had, give an option, put on a drip, all these things I had no idea. That they were literally hours away from intubating me.

[00:12:08] Angela Foster: They didn't tell me that because they just said it's worse than we thought it's an immediate omission. And it was a few days later when they said, we're just retaking your bloods, we're seeing improvement. This is amazing. And I connected with myself. As I say, I felt more peaceful. And I also felt this profound sense of love.

[00:12:26] Angela Foster: And so I kind of made, I would say a psychological commitment at that point, I'm going to get well now, like any kind of journey. It's never that simple. Is it when you leave, when I came out of the hospital, I was so happy to be alive, but then very quickly. I realized just how weak I was. I'd lost a ton of weight.

[00:12:44] Angela Foster: I, was really struggling within six weeks. They wanted to kind of rescan to see the damage and they couldn't because I'd got another chest infection. So I was having, it was clear to me at that point, I'm going to have to build my immune system back up. And that's when I started initially just studying this for me.

[00:13:00] Angela Foster: It was like, how can I get really well for my kids? That's all I want to do. And then as I started to get better and better, I realized that I'd done, I was in a situation, I wasn't working, I'd taken some time off. I was fully focused on my health and I realized that I had these two things, these two parallel worlds where I could be.

[00:13:18] Angela Foster: super successful as a corporate lawyer and really high achieving, but then burning out, or I could be not working and really health, full of health and vitality. I hadn't yet come off the meds and I'm totally happy as you've asked, to talk through that process in a moment, but I could feel really healthy and full of vitality.

[00:13:35] Angela Foster: And I was working my way to being medication free at that point. And then I was like, I want to combine these two worlds. There has to be something where you can have both. And that's really where the whole, like my. Podcast high performance health was born as it's like, let's bring those together. And what I realized over time is that if you really want to have true high performance in life, in terms of longevity in your business, in your relationships with your family and friends, and most importantly with yourself, then health is the foundation because it is that.

[00:14:02] Angela Foster: pillar, isn't it? It's that it's the stool with, if that leg goes, nothing else will stand up. And so I kind of, yeah. And then I started working with more and more people, started the podcast in 2019. And later that year I managed to fully transition off all medication. And since then I've been medication free, which.

[00:14:21] Angela Foster: was against doctor's advice. I was told you're going to be on this mess for the rest of your life because it had been so long. 

[00:14:28] Christa Biegler: I think that's helpful for people to hear because people hear that all the time. And it's, there's a mourning period, right? Like the stages of grief or the stages of whatever.

[00:14:38] Christa Biegler: It's like, I am not sure I want to accept that. And you didn't have to accept it. I always think one of my mantras is that there's always another option typically. Usually there's always like multiple options. And so I can't wait to go to talking a little bit more about nervous system stuff, because I always think, how do you make nervous system sexy?

[00:14:57] Christa Biegler: It's like how you overcome burnout without quitting your job. But before we go there let's finish the conversation a little bit on over on coming off of those meds. Because what I'm hearing is that you put. A lot of eggs in the basket of taking care of your health, which allowed things to come into balance, which allowed you to maybe come off of those meds.

[00:15:15] Christa Biegler: It's just like where my brain is coming from. So tell us a little bit about that process. 

[00:15:20] Angela Foster: So that process was, mental, physical, and spiritual. I think the spiritual component I hadn't looked after. Like my definition of spirituality was being raised as a strict Catholic. And that actually just led to rebellion because that's religion.

[00:15:33] Angela Foster: And I always think when you think of spirituality, religion is an organized form, right? It's almost like following, not to belittle it in any way, but if you compare it to, for example, sports teams, you may have a love. of soccer or baseball, whatever it is, but the team that you then support is kind of identifying almost like the religion.

[00:15:52] Angela Foster: The game itself is the spirituality, if you like in just to kind of make a comparison. And I hadn't focused on that because I'd moved away from it. And I think that's why perhaps I wasn't as in touch with myself. So I'd done. Psychological work. As I said, I'd done CBT. Now what I was starting to realize after, I think one of the first books I picked up on this was Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr.

[00:16:14] Angela Foster: Joe Dispenza. And I realized, I had to break the habit of being myself and what he talks about, how you can signal. New genes to act in new ways was what had happened to me in the hospital. And I changed my immune system. So I was busy kind of really exploring that, exploring different forms of meditation, breath work, visualization, visualizing what I wanted to achieve.

[00:16:36] Angela Foster: And at the same time, working on all of the individual components, my sleep, which was terrible, I had to address that, my nutrition, my fitness and understanding that it wasn't just. And even now, I think where you've had that corporate background, you've been a high achiever, your type A personality, you're conditioned to believe, well, if I just work harder, it gets better, right?

[00:16:55] Angela Foster: But it doesn't over the longterm, this is the thing. And it was the same with fitness. It was just always push. Now I've learned to embrace other disciplines and things, and I think it's about, as I say, which we can talk about in a moment, biosyncing, which really helps you to sync with your femur physiology and your future self and your goals and dreams.

[00:17:13] Christa Biegler: Well, let's talk a little bit about biosyncing. Tell us what you mean by biosyncing and kind of what's involved. 

[00:17:20] Angela Foster: So I was using my biohacking, like different methodologies and things. A lot of the influences in the space, certainly at the time, if we go back like five, six, seven years ago, it was a very masculine environment and I was trying to find, well, how does this work for women?

[00:17:33] Angela Foster: Because actually everything in that space, well, not everything, but a lot of it is about providing more stress. Right. It's about fasting. It's about exercise. It's like, but this is where I've like, I've had so much stress. Do I need more stress? And so what I started to realize was, I knew, for example, like if we take a very simple example, I'm a really early morning person, I'm going to wake up at 5am regardless, that didn't fit with the life of a corporate lawyer.

[00:17:58] Angela Foster: They don't start work till 10am. So no matter how early you get up, it's irrelevant. Cause you're still going to be there at midnight, 1, 2am. They're night owls. By definition, that's how deals seem to get done. So I realized actually I'm a morning person. What if I truly embrace that and start syncing my day with my chronotype?

[00:18:15] Angela Foster: What if I really look into the person that I want to become and get really clear on my future self and bring that person into the present moment and sync with my goals and dreams? What if I look at my values, Dr. John Demartini. Guests on my show, he's done so much work around values. And when we sync and align with our values, we achieve true resonance.

[00:18:34] Angela Foster: What if I found out what my resonant frequency is for breathing? And really that's the concept of biosyncing is this bio optimization. It's about learning what works with you and also understanding the female hormone cycle. And rather than just constantly pushing. All of the time, which does, as have an effect on sex hormones and adrenal function.

[00:18:54] Angela Foster: It's about learning to embrace that femininity and working with it. 

[00:18:58] Christa Biegler: I love to hear you talk about this because. We were working on a toolkit around lab values, et cetera, and the word biohacking kept coming up and my team, which is very good at leaning into the feminine side of things, they were feeling very prickled, very irritated by the word biohacking for probably the reasons that you say, right?

[00:19:21] Christa Biegler: Because it's been a very masculine term and about inducing more stress. And that's kind of the challenge is you can't induce more stress on the body. Okay. When the body doesn't have any stores for handling stress, right? When your adrenals are already empty. So let's talk a little bit about the nervous system, but I have a question about some of the therapies you did early on.

[00:19:41] Christa Biegler: Cause it's something I think about something that was really transformational for my nervous system personally. It was a style of let's call it life coaching, which I hate that term because it's a little bit broad, but let's say it's more future focused and how reprogramming thoughts. And you talked about that as well, but you talked about it from cognitive behavioral, which the cognitive behavioral therapy triangle can be used in coaching for forward thinking.

[00:20:02] Christa Biegler: But often when we think about psychotherapy, it is often a past focused talk therapy, What was your experience? And sometimes we get, and I know I'm kind of like jumping around to that, but I'm curious about this because so often when we talk about mental emotional health, people go to a therapist and maybe they start to talk about their past.

[00:20:22] Christa Biegler: And my coach would always say, it's not helpful to continue to talking about this past thing. And I'm just curious what your experience was with that. 

[00:20:30] Angela Foster: I would totally agree with that. I mean, let's put it this way. I've been through a lot of therapists and I think that, and that's unusual in the UK by the way, right?

[00:20:37] Angela Foster: Because there's so much more accepted in America. But I found that talking about my past really wasn't that helpful because the past is gone. It's not here anymore. And ultimately you want to create a new belief system. If you're in base embracing future self, a new you, like what. Got you here isn't going to get you there.

[00:20:55] Angela Foster: So we talked about it and I think it's a good way of offloading if you like, but I was, as I went through different therapists, which sounds awful, doesn't it in a way, but I found that, certain people give me some skills and I could get so far, but they couldn't take me where I needed to go.

[00:21:10] Angela Foster: So then I had to find someone else to keep progressing. And I was very fortunate in the end. A lady here who really helped me. She was highly qualified and she brought me into the true present moment, which is where all of the power is because we only create our future from the present moment.

[00:21:29] Angela Foster: It doesn't happen anywhere else. The past and the future don't exist. And that's when I started to embrace things like nature walks and just allow that stillness to come into my life. And when I did that, you get these profound insights and creativity and flow that comes in and you start to, have more of what I think is actually a forgotten skill.

[00:21:50] Angela Foster: I think as kids, we all had it. I don't know if you remember like long car journeys where you'd be listening to music and looking out the window. And just thinking about your dreams, right? What am I going to do when I grow up? Or how do I even want it to go? I was looking at my daughter the other day, she had music on it and she looked like she was asleep.

[00:22:05] Angela Foster: And when I, afterwards she said to me, mommy, I wasn't sleeping. I was thinking about this and this, and it was so much fun. But when do we stop dreaming as adults? Do you know what I mean? We kind of, you get to a point, I think somewhere. And I think this is again, Joe Dispenza talks about the fact that by 35, your belief system, I think he says has been built and I think you get to that age in your mid thirties where you kind of think.

[00:22:26] Angela Foster: This is me. And you anticipate that in another 10 years time, it's just going to be you, but older. And that's not true. And if you actually look and go, who was I 10 years ago? Very different. And if you forecast into the future, you're probably going to be quite different again, but it's really up to you, whether you decide who you're going to be and who you're going to become.

[00:22:46] Angela Foster: Because if you don't, and you're not clear on your values, then you, by definition, will be living to someone else's. And that's, what's going to shape your future, their value system. 

[00:22:56] Christa Biegler: That was my favorite thing that you've said so far. Did you ever I've heard you reference Joe Dispenza a couple of times.

[00:23:02] Christa Biegler: He's very transformational for a lot of people. Have you ever been to one of his conferences? I 

[00:23:06] Angela Foster: haven't, but it's on my list and I think it's because they're a week long and I haven't wanted to leave my kids yet for a week. 

[00:23:13] Angela Foster: So yeah. 

[00:23:14] Christa Biegler: Yeah. Well, we'll keep in touch about going to the St. Joseph's conference.

[00:23:17] Christa Biegler: Cause I just continue to look at his event calendar and wonder when will one of these work out? 

[00:23:22] Christa Biegler: You brought up offline just talking about some insights around the nervous system that you found exciting. That's what you are feeling very intrigued by in practice now. Will you talk a little bit about that?

[00:23:34] Angela Foster: Yeah, for sure. I think a lot of people have heard of what the metric heart rate variability and some people are tracking it. So just that the people that maybe haven't heard that term before it's really looking at the interbeat variability. So the heart, as is not designed to be, is not designed to beat like a metronome.

[00:23:48] Angela Foster: So if we take like somebody who has, it's easy to say 60 beats a minute, it could be 50 could be 40 something could be higher, but let's say the average heart rate is 60 beats per minute. It's not going to be one beat uniformly every second. It's a variation between those beats and that variation is really important because the more variability that we see generally speaking, the better your adaptive reserve is so the better capacity you have and resiliency and stress at any one point in time.

[00:24:17] Angela Foster: And so we can look at heart rate variability to measure. how we're holding up. And if we start to see it trending down, there's a lot of stress going on. And obviously it across the menstrual cycle a little bit as well, because progesterone influences it. And it changes again in, things like perimenopause.

[00:24:33] Angela Foster: But if we monitor someone's HRV, then we can really help them to understand. And what we've been doing and we do in our biosyncing blueprint is actually to use a bodyguard. It's a medical grade device. To look at someone's HRV during the day all day long, because with things like the aura ring and the boop strap, you can look at it at night and you can see your overnight metric.

[00:24:52] Angela Foster: You can use something like a polar age 10 and take a morning reading in conjunction with an app like elite HRV, but the magic really happens. I think when you can start to observe what's going on during the day and see how your behaviors, your thoughts, what you're eating and everything is influencing your nervous system.

[00:25:07] Angela Foster: In real time and now how that picture is being mirrored, there's patterns that go on in sleep according to what's happened during the day. And that's what we've observed. And so if you're not recovering, it's not just about working hard a week and recovering at the weekend. If you're not introducing micro recoveries throughout your day and letting yourself rebalance, that's when your sleep can become really disrupted and you're not moving into that, those sort of deep states of repair.

[00:25:33] Christa Biegler: You called the device you like to use. Did you call it a body guard? 

[00:25:37] Angela Foster: Yeah, it's called a bodyguard by a company called first beat. 

[00:25:41] Christa Biegler: I'm not familiar with it. Let me use the ordering for example, or any kind of sleep tracker. If people already know that their sleep is not amazing and they have a device that continues to tell them that it's not amazing.

[00:25:52] Christa Biegler: It's like reinforce, it's kind of like. Some talk therapy where it's kind of reinforcing this bad. How do you deal with that when working with H. R. V. and people have kind of chronically low H. R. V. and they keep getting that messaging? That's the interventions probably. But what would you say 

[00:26:07] Christa Biegler: about that?

[00:26:09] Angela Foster: So what I would say is whenever you're looking at data, right, it should be used alongside intuition. How are you feeling? And you're addressing it to get better. So if you think of it as a starting point, anybody can improve from where they are. And so really, it's just to inform the process. It's not there and designed to be there for you to obsess about or worry about it.

[00:26:29] Angela Foster: And I think the key thing with metrics like HRV is never to compare them against anyone else's. Because your HRV is unique to you. And some people, a third of what your HRV, a third of it is actually genetic. So if you're genetically predisposed to a lower HRV, it's going to be lower than your friend who has a higher HRV.

[00:26:47] Angela Foster: If you have a background of endurance based aerobic training, you're probably also going to have a higher HRV. So if you take someone now who has a background in endurance aerobic work and they have a genetic predisposition to a higher HRV, They're kind of 66% or so of the way they're ahead of the game.

[00:27:04] Angela Foster: And then the third component is really looking at your lifestyle and your behaviors now. So I think when people start to understand that of thinking what's within my zone of control and how can I influence it and start to actually approach things of, well, I love Tim Ferriss where he says, what would this look like if it were easy?

[00:27:19] Angela Foster: What if it looked like if you went to bed and you just thought, I'm going to lay here and either way. I'm getting rest. Suddenly there's no sleep pressure, right? I'm lying in bed and I can think happy thoughts or whatever I want and that is rest for my body or mind. If I sleep, it's a bonus, right?

[00:27:36] Angela Foster: It's lovely to sleep, but sleep's like falling in love, isn't it? It's kind of almost like, it's like fertility. All these things, they just kind of happen to you or for you as opposed to you influencing and controlling them. If you try to go to sleep, it's going to be very difficult to do that.

[00:27:54] Angela Foster: But then if I also say to you, what do you think your next thought is going to be? Your mind will go blank. Do you know what I mean? It's like, but if I say, do you start worrying, you'll start thinking about a whole load of things. So I think some of it is like thinking, okay, the data can inform things that I do.

[00:28:11] Angela Foster: And it's great when I do certain practices, I see an improvement. I can embrace more of those. And when I do other things, doesn't, my nervous system doesn't hold up so well. So if I'm doing things that put me under pressure, that doesn't mean I should stop doing them. Like that's how we perform a degree of stress is important, but what if I can work in some things so that I have these periods of stress recovery, and start treating yourself more like an athlete where you really just want to perform at your highest level overall, then you embrace all these other modalities.

[00:28:42] Christa Biegler: Yeah, I really had to smile when you quoted Tim Ferriss. If this was easy, what would it look like? Because that might be one of my most often used quotes, especially when clients are asking this question. Cause they just, people are so afraid of failing. They just want to like know the right answer. So they look outside themselves for the right answer.

[00:29:02] Christa Biegler: And so often I just answer. With that question, because it's like, well, if this was easy, what would be the answer, right? Like don't make the answer difficult because it's going to be a lot of friction anyway. So I love what you talked about with control. What happens to the nervous system? What's in my zone of control.

[00:29:19] Christa Biegler: And we talked about a lot of topics today. We talked about extreme burnout to the point of hospitalization, low immune system. We talked about how this sense of gratitude, happiness, joy started creating biochemical shifts in your immune system that allowed you to recover. While still humbling you to realize that you still had more work to do.

[00:29:43] Christa Biegler: And I love that you talked about how biohacking had been really masculine and more stress inducing. And so changing that to focus on some HRV metrics, what's going on with the nervous system. Et cetera has been really helpful and you're taking really more of maybe a feminine version of biohacking now.

[00:30:04] Christa Biegler: So if you could tell people one thing, or if you could leave them with a message, what would 

[00:30:10] Christa Biegler: it be? 

[00:30:12] Angela Foster: I think it would be believe in yourself, just believe in and trust the process of what you're going through, because I think the universe has a way when we're delivered challenges of it all working out for us in the end.

[00:30:24] Angela Foster: And this is just part of your journey. And if you could. Trust in that process, that it's all leading you to where you're meant to go, that right now you're exactly where you're meant to be and have that self belief instead of keep coming up with things of like self blame or I did this wrong or I should be better, I should be this, I should be that and just accept that you're on the right path.

[00:30:45] Angela Foster: Actually, life just actually unfolds a little more easily for you.

[00:30:49] Christa Biegler: I love that. 

[00:30:51] Christa Biegler: Angela, where can people find you online? 

[00:30:54] Angela Foster: They can find me. They can find my podcast, which is high performance health, which you're coming on. I'm looking forward to that. They can find me at Angela foster performance. com. I'm on Instagram at Angela S. Foster, or if they want to kind of get a snapshot. On the health and where for anyone listening things, where am I, where, how's my seat, how's my hormones? What about the insights I'm tracking? How am I fueling my body? How am I training both my body and mind? Then we offer a biohacking quiz with a free personalized report and they can find that at your total health check. com. 

[00:31:23] Angela Foster: So it takes like 60 seconds to fill out and then we'll give you scores in each area and send you some personalized recommendations on how to improve. 

[00:31:30] Christa Biegler: Well, thank you so much for coming on today. 

[00:31:33] Angela Foster: Thanks for having me.

[00:31:35] Angela Foster: Sharing and reviewing this podcast is the best way to help us succeed with our mission to help integrate the best of East and West and empower you to raise the bar on your health story. Just go to review this podcast. com forward slash less stressed life. That's review this podcast. com forward slash less stressed life.

[00:31:56] Angela Foster: And you'll be taken directly to a page where you can insert your review and hit post.