Despite the human ability to adapt to new and changing environments, our bodies simply weren't designed to live in the modern world. Take for instance the physiological stress response: you see a bear, your heart starts pumping harder and faster, your system fills with adrenaline, digestion gets put on hold, and all of your body's attention is focused on survival. In this day and age, our bodies are being triggered to show this stress response multiple times a day—whether, during an argument with a significant other, the ping of an email notification that you know is from your boss or an alert for a new exam result on your college account. We're constantly bombarded by signals, messages, requests, expectations, and demands, and we've entered a state of chronic stress as a result. The result? Burnout, a term recently recognized by the World Health Organization as an actual medical syndrome characterized by exhaustion, the inability to focus, a feeling of disengagement from our surroundings, and the inability to fall asleep.

 

CEO and co-founder of Apollo, Kathryn Fantauzzi, joins the podcast to discuss a potential remedy for burnout, which is a software platform, mobile app, and wearable device that sends vibrations to the body which the brain interprets as safety, and when you feel safe, your heart rate and breathing even out, which makes it easier to concentrate, feel calm, and fall asleep. Fantauzzi explains that this technology harnesses and amplifies the benefits of practices such as mindfulness and meditation without requiring the user to do anything other than wear the device on their wrist or ankle. In clinical studies, users have shown a 25% improvement in cognitive performance and accuracy under stress, as well as the ability to fall asleep faster, and improve heart rate variability, an indicator of the body's overall resilience and recovery from stress. And since the software is integrated with Apple Healthkit, it can pull from a user's biometric data to curate the best solution for their experience with burnout. 

 

Tune in for the full conversation, and check out https://apolloneuro.com/.