The Meat Mafia Podcast #410 Salim Najjar: What Your HRV Score Is Really Telling You
Salim Najjar is a former nuclear engineer turned wellness entrepreneur and HRV educator. After co-founding Sound, a pioneering unsweetened sparkling tea brand, he spent years biohacking his way through performance culture—until his body forced him to listen. Now, Salim is on a mission to teach people how to regulate their nervous systems, master their stress, and reconnect with their bodies through the lens of HRV (Heart Rate Variability). His work bridges engineering, spirituality, and somatic awareness to help high-performers access true resilience from within.
In this episode, Salim Najjar returns to go deep on the one metric he believes can change your health and your life: HRV. After burning out while building his beverage company, Salim discovered that high performance without recovery leads to breakdown. This conversation unpacks his six-year deep dive into nervous system regulation—from biohacking and Bikram yoga to trauma processing, spiritual surrender, and living nomadically. If you want to understand stress at its root and build lasting resilience in a chaotic world, this episode is your blueprint.
What we cover:
- What HRV actually measures
- The difference between stress and chronic stress
- How your thoughts and emotional stories affect your HRV in real time.
- HRV as a language of the nervous system
Timestamps:
(1:00) Intro
(4:00) Discovering baking soda protocols and mistrusting the mainstream
(7:00) The origin story of Sound and biohacking in NYC
(10:00) Breaking down from burnout and discovering Bikram yoga
(12:00) What HRV actually measures and why it matters
(19:00) HRV as a language—why you can’t compare your score to others
(26:00) How trauma gets stuck in the body and lowers HRV
(35:00) Limbic brain shutdown and losing access to your performance
(43:00) Why stress is necessary—chronic stress is the problem
(1:00:15) Tripling HRV in 24 hours by surrendering and going nomadic
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