34 → 55Milliseconds RMSSD
a 62% increase
About
I start one level below where this field usually starts.
Most performance work begins with the mind. I begin with the nervous system the mind is running on, because a system stuck in sympathetic activation will not run a mental skill properly no matter how well it has been rehearsed.
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The short version
Clinician, scientist, and the person who built the model.
- DisciplineClinical health and performance psychologist, specialising in psychophysiology and the human stress response
- CertificationBoard certified in heart rate variability biofeedback and in peripheral biofeedback
- MethodCreator of The Resilient Engine, and of the intervention model inside it, Nervous System Resiliency Training
- PracticeFounder and owner, Thrive Wellness and Performance, Greenville South Carolina
- IndustryChief Health and Performance Officer, Ohm Health
- PreviouslyCo-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Hanu Health
- ClinicalWJB Dorn VA Medical Center, Columbia, and the Greenville Outpatient VA Clinic
What I actually do
I measure the human stress response, then train it.
The conventional version of this field came out of sport psychology. It teaches mental skills: goal setting, visualisation, self talk, routines before competition. Those tools are real, and I use them. But they assume you can reach them under pressure, and that assumption is exactly what breaks when the stakes are high.
So the first question I ask is not what you are thinking. It is what your body is doing. That means heart rate variability, respiration, sleep architecture and recovery data, gathered as a structured baseline rather than as a conversation about how the last few weeks have felt.
Once the physiology can shift states on demand, the psychological work starts holding. That order matters, and reversing it is the most common mistake I see.
In session
The traces on that screen are the client's own autonomic response, in real time.
Not a report generated later, and not an app's interpretation. Watching your own physiology move while you are the one moving it is what turns an abstraction into a skill.
How I work
Bottom up first, then top down.
The capacity to attend usefully to your internal state depends on having an internal state regulated enough to be worth attending to.
Trying to do top down work in a chronically dysregulated nervous system is like trying to read in a moving car.
The two inputs
- Bottom up. The body is the input. Resonance frequency training, biofeedback and sleep as the substrate everything else rests on
- Top down. The mind is the input. Attention treated as a physiological signal, with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy building psychological flexibility and anchoring the work to what a person actually values
- The protocol changes when the data says it should, not on a fixed schedule
- Daily training is short, roughly eight to twelve minutes, four to five days a week. It is a habit rather than a block of time
Who I work with
People running a nervous system hard who have never trained it directly.
Olympians, a Super Bowl champion, a Cy Young winner, a multiple time Hart Trophy winner and a PGA major champion. Athletes and teams across the NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, PGA, LPGA, MLS, ATP, WTA, UFC and Formula 1.
And well beyond sport: executives and teams inside Fortune 100 companies, founders carrying sustained decision load, and operators in high consequence roles where state control is the job and there is no off season to recover in.
The pattern that brings people in
- Performance is still fine, but recovery is not
- Sleep has become unreliable
- The drop from effort into rest takes hours where it used to take minutes
- Pressure that used to be routine has started landing differently
What adaptation looks like
Six weeks with an MLB All-Star pitcher.
1250 → 4539LF power, ms²
a 263% increase
a 263% increase
6Weeks of training
eight to twelve minutes a day
eight to twelve minutes a day
3Reported changes
deeper sleep, faster recovery, steadier on the mound
deeper sleep, faster recovery, steadier on the mound
Those are two of the standard measures of autonomic capacity, moving in the direction the model predicts, in a real engagement. They are not a promise about anyone else. The point of measuring is that the adaptation either shows up in the data or it does not.
Boundaries
What this is not.
Not therapy
This is performance work. It is not treatment for a mental health condition and it is not a substitute for clinical care.
Not classic sport psychology
There is psychological work in it, but the entry point is physiological and the training is measured.
Not a course
Nothing here is a recording you buy and work through alone. The protocol is fitted to your data and revised against it.
Not a score to chase
HRV is the instrument, not the goal. Raising a number in an app is not the adaptation, and treating it as the target is how people end up training the measurement instead of themselves.
Working together
Consulting, advisory, and the stage.
Organisational consulting for executive teams and professional organisations, scientific advisory for the companies building the technology that reads this data, and keynotes on what the stress response actually is. One email, read by me.
The Resilient Engine
The model, written out in public.
Dr. Jay writes the framework piece by piece: what the research actually says, what the protocols are, and what the data does when people run them. No cadence promised and nothing padded.