Introducing Yudemon
Elevating Human Happiness, Performance, and Wellbeing through Creative Technology
Our body and mind are not separate entities.
Many would even argue that there is no strong reason to believe that the mind is anything but a manifestation of the body.
Whether you fall into this group or believe that your mind is more than just an emergent phenomenon of the meat-machine that is you, it is hard to deny their strong connection.
Everyone will be keenly aware of the impact our mind has on our body, from the placebo effect or the energy boost we get from euphoria, to the physical pain and even suppressed immune system when we experience sadness or depression.
But I’m sure everyone has also experienced the opposite.
Just think of the positive mental effects of a workout, a cold shower, or even just going out on a bright sunny day. Or, on the other extreme, the mental dullness and haze after a night of heavy drinking or when sick in bed with a flu. There is even increasing evidence pointing to inflammation as one of the main causes for depression and other mental ailments.
Yet, when it comes to improving our mind — whether that’s in order to get the highest performance out of a “healthy” mind, or in the (increasingly common and important) context of dealing with mental health issues — we have barely begun to make use of this link.
While talk therapy and other staples of psychotherapy can be powerful interventions, they should only be part of the tools in our toolkit.
The fact is: It is extremely difficult to control, improve, or heal the mind solely through the mind. Yet it is our go-to approach.
It’s not that one approach (mind to body, or body to mind) is better than the other, both are equally valid tools. But the latter is completely underutilized and most people, including many mental health professionals, don’t even consider it.
It’s time to change this.
Addressing our mental state through physiology first is at least as powerful, if not more so, as focusing on the psychological aspect.
Rather than trying to change the content of the mind and hoping that it trickles down to our overall wellbeing and how we feel physically, we can start from the other end, changing our physiology and have it seep up to our mind and change its content.
After all, it is far easier to change our physiology in predictable ways than it is to directly change our state of mind.
Accessing the Mind through the Body
A key route to access the mind through the body is via the autonomic nervous system (ANS).
The ANS is responsible for the control of those bodily functions that happen automatically, without our conscious effort.
Thanks to the ANS, your heart beats without you having to will every contraction, and your pupils automatically constrict when you look into a bright light.
But just because we don’t have to control these processes, doesn’t mean we can’t.
We can consciously “hijack” our ANS in both indirect and direct ways.
By controlling our environment — through light, sound, temperature, and a whole array of other cues — we can send powerful sensory signals to our nervous system and utilize its natural responses to guide it into a desired state or behavior.
Beyond this indirect control, some aspects of the ANS can also be taken over directly by our conscious mind — most notably, our breathing. And since all the components of the ANS are closely linked, controlling our breathing in deliberate ways also allows us to steer many other aspects.
Personally, I have been interested in taking control over my physiology — and in turn my mind — for a long time.
I’ve been taking ice baths long before Wim Hof popularized them, been a long term (although rather irregular) meditator, tracked and analysed my sleep and caffeine habits in detail, and explored my limits through running ultramarathons, psychoactive “supplements,” and regular fasts.
But last year, largely inspired by the work of Dr. Leah Lagos, I got particularly interested in and excited about the power of the ANS.
Dr. Lagos is a performance psychologist, and a leading expert in heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback training (HRVB). I have previously written extensively about HRV training and my experience with Dr. Lagos’s protocol.
As a recent meta-analysis of HRV training’s impact on depression in the prestigious journal Nature put it, “greater [heart rate] variability indicates greater ability of the autonomic nervous system to regulate itself. […] Numerous studies have demonstrated the positive effect of HRVB in reducing physical and psychological symptoms [of depression] and increasing wellbeing.”
In a nutshell, HRV biofeedback training uses a specific breathing technique (known as resonance breathing), guided by real-time monitoring of the practitioner’s physiological response, to give access to the ANS and exploit it.
Through the breath we gain direct control of the heart, which in turn allows us to access and manipulate our mind.
Inspired by my own results with this method, as well as the rapid progress of this newly emergent research field and the rapidly growing interest in the elite performance world, I decided to not only sit by passively as a “user,” but actively contribute to its progress through my own very unique lens and background.
And so, I am excited to announce Yudemon.
Yudemon
In the long term, I see Yudemon as a container — my own personal playground — for explorations at the intersection of my various interests, and using them in a quest to optimize human happiness, performance, and overall wellbeing through non-pharmaceutical interventions.
To kick things off, I will be focusing specifically on HRV biofeedback training.
I am by no means an expert in this field (and even among amateurs there are probably many people more knowledgable than me). But I believe that I can contribute by augmenting traditional HRV training with something that is more within my expertise: AI, music, and creativity.
From what I have seen so far, the actual feedback component of biofeedback training is still very primitive. Sensors show basic real-time bio data which we are encouraged to improve, and simple visual timers help us guide our breathing.
But this barely scratches the surface of what could be done, especially as bio-sensors and other technology are improving.
As mentioned above, sound is a strong environmental cue that can help us access the ANS (and an entire field of functional music is rapidly evolving around this idea).
What if we try to complement the effect of resonance breathing with sound cues? And what if these cues aren’t just static and preprogrammed, but generative soundscapes and music that is created on the fly based on your individual real-time biometric data? What if we then add a reinforcement learning algorithm that can tweak the music generation system (as well as the breathing frequency, or potentially other environmental cues) also in real time to get the strongest response from your body?
That is real biofeedback. And that is what I want to start exploring through Yudemon.
I am also hoping to contribute to the increasing number of people who, with a healthy skepticism and scientific rigour, explore and build on the treasure trove of methods that have been passed through centuries of medical and spiritual traditions around the world, but are unfortunately strongly intermingled with at best ineffective methods, or much worse, pseudo-scientific bullshit touted by mostly self-proclaimed new-age gurus.
Yudemon not only combines my interests in AI, music, and biohacking, but is also well aligned with the work I have done around Time Off.
The ANS comprises two parts, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. The former controls our fight-or-flight response, whereas the latter is responsible for “rest-and-digest”. A key part of HRV biofeedback training is re-balancing the two components, which for many of us have shifted far towards the former.
During resonance breathing, the inhale stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, speeding up the heart, and the exhale triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, slowing the heart down. This cycle trains the two systems to work in harmony.
In my bestselling book Time Off, my co-author and I talk about the concept of a rest ethic, and we use a breathing analogy to explain it: work ethic is like an inhale, and rest ethic like an exhale. They are two parts of the same system, and to be happy and successful we need to balance the two, and especially focus on the neglected exhale, the rest ethic.
We did not think of resonance breathing or the autonomic nervous system when coming up with this analogy, but in retrospect it couldn’t be more appropriate.
As a writer, speaker, and consultant around rest ethic and wellbeing, I also hope to share these physiology-based insights and techniques with my clients and a wider audience.
In all these efforts I will be closely working with Nao Tokui and his team at Qosmo, who are also contributing funds to Yudemon. You can find out more about their groundbreaking work around the applications of AI to music, art, and design on their website, or their blog.
In addition to Qosmo, I am in discussion with a few other potential partners and collaborators, and I’m really looking forward to share some more about this in the future.
The Origin of the Name
The name Yudemon was inspired by the ancient Greek concepts of daimon and eudaimonia (often pronounced démon and eudémonia).
The exact meaning of daimon evolved over the ages, but the daimon has always been closely related to the human soul and spirit — but with a divine element to it as well.
It was seen as a spiritual driving force for great achievements and genius, a strong unrest deep in our soul that forces us to explore our full potential and the unknown within us.
The daimonic is not inherently good or bad, and as such can lead us to deep self-discovery as well as self-destruction. It’s that powerful force that many elite performers and creative geniuses over the centuries have utilized, but have also struggled with. Not coincidentally the modern word demon traces its roots back to daimon.
Heraclitus said that the character of a human is his daimon, and Plutarch described the daimon as a chance for mortals to come in contact with a great spiritual power.
In more modern psychology, the daimonic refers to our inherent natural drive for individuation, and elevating and improving our self.
It is also closely related to Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow. Jung himself said that
“I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon. […]
A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”
Eudaimon (the same eu as in euphoria or eustress, meaning “good” or “well”) can be seen as the positive manifestation of the daimon.
Today, eudaimonia is often simply translated as well-being or flourishing, but it’s true meaning is more nuanced than this (and has been interpreted differently by different school’s of philosophy over the ages).
“Happiness is to live in harmony with one’s daimon.”
— Aristotle
Aristotle said that eudaimonia means “doing and living well” and saw it as one of humanity’s greatest aspirations.
With Yudemon, I want to help people — and, quite selfishly, myself — access their daimon, work with it, and achieve Aristotle’s goal of living in harmony with it.
And besides this fancy and deep backstory, Yudemon is also just fun to say, catchy, and has a nice Japanese ring to it, paying tribute to my strong connection to Japan.
The Beginning
As outlined above, I have many ideas and directions I want to explore through Yudemon.
But concretely, I will start by developing my own HRV biofeedback training system.
There are many great existing apps out there, my favourite being HRV4Biofeedback by Marco Altini, which will work great for the average user. But none of them offer the level of flexibility I was looking for to do some more advanced analytics and experiments on myself.
So my first step will be to recreate a tool containing the common features, and extend it by the ones I would personally like to see.
And then things will get interesting.
Once the basic functionality is in place, I will start building the AI and sound components on top of it.
I will share my experiments and progress in my articles, as well as through a mailing list. If you would like to stay up to date and get early access, I encourage you to sign up for it on the Yudemon website.
It is honestly a bit scary for me setting out on this new path, but I couldn’t be more excited, and I also believe that the timing is perfect. Both research interest in this field as well as sensor and other technology are rapidly picking up in pace, and we will see a lot of breakthroughs over the coming years.
I hope that Yudemon can contribute to this progress.