Heart Rate Variability (HRV)

Ok, I know this may seem random, but let’s start here. Somehow it was an early place where things started making more sense for me. 

As I was digging into the science of flourishing and neuroscience, I kept coming across people talking about heart rate variability, or HRV for short. The On Being podcast with Bessel van der Kolk stands out as being the first place I remember hearing about it (really worth listening to—very similar to Dr. Gabor Maté’s position). 

Van der Kolk helped pioneer our understanding of trauma and PTSD. He helped discover that trauma is stored in the body and isn’t something we can talk or think our way out of. He found we have to learn to feel our way out by learning to feel safe in our bodies again. (If you want to dive deeper, read his book, The Body Keeps The Score.)

Some researchers at the Heartmath Institute discovered a way to scientifically measure how stressed our nervous systems are at any given moment by measuring our heart rate variability.

HRV measures the naturally occurring beat-to-beat variation in heart rate.

When I first heard about HRV, I automatically assumed you’d want a super steady heart rate, which would give you a high score. But it turns out that it’s the opposite. It’s better to have a low score with more variability.

Seem counterintuitive to you, too? 

It turns out that our heart rate is actually more constant when we are more stressed. When our primal brain/body takes over in a stressful situation, it forces a rhythm more mechanistically and sharply. But when our body is in the safe/engage mode, it is actually more nuanced, smooth, and adaptive to all the micro-variabilities going on around and inside us. 

Pretty cool, right?

The folks at the Heartmath Institute call the smooth wave patterning a coherent state. 

“Coherence is when the heart, mind, and emotions are aligned and working together harmoniously,” they explain. They say frustration, anxiety, and overwhelm happen when the heart, mind, and emotions aren’t aligned. When we are out of alignment, it is hard for us to make good decisions; we make much better decisions when our heart and mind are aligned.

For me, visually seeing the science of how my brain, heart, and emotions can work together (or not) and what that does in my body was the kind of validation I needed to start taking my emotions more seriously and understand more and more how they work. 

I was starting to see the value but...how do I get all these parts of me aligned?

NEXT UP:

Rigidity vs. Agility

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