Guest: Michael Sandler

Title: Rewiring Life After Trauma: From Brain Injury to Inner Peace with Michael Sandler

When life blindsides you with trauma, stress, overwhelm, and a feeling that recovery is impossible, where do you turn?

In this powerful episode, HeartMath President Deborah Rozman talks with Michael Sandler—author, teacher, and survivor of multiple nearly fatal accidents—about how he rebuilt his life from the inside out after traumatic brain injury. Michael shares candidly about his recovery journey, the dark moments when giving up seemed easier, and the exact inner shifts that helped him reclaim hope, purpose, and joy.

Together, Deborah and Michael discuss how traumatic brain injury and chronic stress can change our heart rhythms and disrupt communication between the heart and brain—and why this matters so much for mental health, emotional balance, and physical recovery. They explore science-based and heart-based practices for:

• Supporting injury recovery and nervous system healing
• Overcoming challenges when it feels impossible to go on
• Moving beyond anxiety, overwhelm, and fear into genuine peace
• Remembering who you really are—beyond your trauma and stress

This uplifting, time-relevant conversation speaks directly to the uncertainty so many feel today and offers practical hope: you can rise above the stress of personal or societal challenges, think more clearly, and reconnect with the love and resilience that have always been at the core of who you are. Join us for this hopeful and awakening conversation.

Deborah closes this beautiful conversation with a guided heart meditation to help listeners find calm, reconnect with their inner resilience, and return to a deeper sense of peace.

About our guest:

Michael Sandler is the co-host of the popular Inspire Nation show, a transformational, self-help, spiritually focused podcast and YouTube channel, along with his wife, fellow coach and teacher, Jessica Lee. He is a best-selling author, speaker, entrepreneur, visionary, coach, and the co-creator of Inspire Nation University and the Automatic Writing Experience online course.

Guest: Amy VaaS

When stress is high, and the future feels uncertain, how do you make good decisions—at work, in your relationships, or in everyday life? This captivating episode explores a practical, science-based way to stay clear and grounded when it matters most.

HeartMath CEO Deborah Rozman has an intriguing conversation with Amy VaaS, former Global Well-Being Leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), who helped bring HeartMath’s heart coherence practices into high-pressure, highly analytical environments, including cybersecurity and risk teams. Amy shares how she moved from focusing only on the brain and neuroscience to realizing that the missing piece was the state of the heart—directly affecting clarity, judgment, communication, and how we show up under stress and overload.

Hear Amy’s real-world stories of how science-based heart coherence practices helped:

• Leaders and teams think more clearly, listen better, and make better decisions even in challenging conversations.
• Teams, under intense pressure to shorten meetings, reduce reactivity, and become “the calm in the storm” for their clients and colleagues.
• People experience improved sleep, feel more emotionally regulated in daily life, and know how to reset their nervous system quickly.

Amy also shares how she now works through her new venture, VAAS Solutions, integrating heart coherence into leadership advising, team effectiveness, and organizational culture—so performance, resilience, and well-being all rise together instead of competing with each other. Her insightful examples reveal how small, consistent coherence practices can quietly transform how leaders, teams, and individuals operate.

Whether you’re a long-time HeartMath fan or completely new to heart coherence, this engaging episode will give you a deeper understanding of why being in a coherent heart state is not just a “nice-to-have wellness perk,” but a practical, repeatable skill for making better decisions under stress in any area of life.

The episode closes with a practical guided heart-focused meditation led by Deborah to help you practice heart coherence for yourself—so you can bring more calm, clarity, and heart into your work, your family, your health, and the everyday decisions that shape your life.

About our guest:

Amy VaaS is the founder and principal advisor of VAAS Solutions. She works with organizations to strengthen leadership, improve team effectiveness, and create cultures where people and performance excel. With over 25 years in globally recognized financial and professional firms, she has led initiatives that empower leaders to navigate complexity and build resilient cultures. Amy integrates neuroscience-based tools, coherence practices, and leadership strategies across onboarding, milestone leadership development, and executive coaching. Today, she partners with companies worldwide to guide leaders through real-world demands while building cultures that advance both people and results.

Guest: Dr. Kat Toups

What if memory loss and cognitive decline aren’t the inevitable parts of aging we’ve been led to believe?

In this episode, our guest is psychiatrist and clinical researcher Dr. Kat Toups, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, who shares hopeful, research-based insights that are reshaping how we understand brain aging and Alzheimer’s disease.

For decades, most Alzheimer’s clinical trials have focused on single solutions—usually drugs—targeting one aspect of the disease. Despite massive investment, these approaches have delivered limited results. Dr. Toups explains why this one-size-fits-all model often falls short: Cognitive decline rarely has a single cause.

Drawing from recent proof-of-concept and randomized controlled trials, Dr. Toups shares with host Deborah Rozman compelling evidence that a personalized, precision-medicine approach—addressing multiple contributors at once—leads to meaningful improvements in memory, thinking speed, and overall brain function, even in people with mild cognitive impairment and early-stage dementia.

In her soon-to-be-published paper, titled Precision Medicine Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease: Successful Randomized Controlled Trial, Dr. Toups shares striking patient outcomes achieved through a whole-person approach that included nutrition, exercise, quality sleep, brain training, and stress management. For the stress reduction intervention, the study incorporated heart rhythm coherence biofeedback and a coherence training technique developed by HeartMath that participants practiced for 10 minutes per day. Dr. Toups selected this for ease of use and high consistency of practice among elderly participants—important factors for long-term adherence and achieving significant outcomes.

This episode also brings a deeply human perspective, as Dr. Toups shares her own recovery story from cognitive impairment. At the heart of this conversation is a message listeners rarely hear: Brain aging is not necessarily a one-way path. With this new protocol and early action, protecting—and even restoring—brain health appears far more possible than previously thought.

This episode offers clarity and hope for individuals and families navigating concerns about memory loss, Alzheimer’s, and brain health as we age.

About our guest:

Kat Toups, MD, DFAPA, IFMCP, is a distinguished functional medicine psychiatrist, clinical researcher, and thought leader in the field of cognitive health.

She collaborated with Dr. Dale Bredesen as the principal investigator on two successful multi-modal precision medicine clinical trials to reverse cognitive decline in patients with mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer’s disease. With decades of clinical and research experience, Dr. Toups combines psychiatry, functional medicine, and cutting-edge research to uncover and address the root causes of cognitive decline. Her innovative, personalized approach has made her a sought-after speaker, educator, and mentor in the Alzheimer’s and dementia prevention community.