Anxiety is not just in your head, it's in your body.
And specifically it's triggered in your nervous system.
Today we're going to talk about how you can use heart rate variability
as one way to get a numerical measure of how resilient your nervous
system is and how you can use HRV to actually train your nervous system
to calm anxiety more efficiently.
In the last video, we talked about biofeedback for anxiety.
In this video, we're going to dive a little deeper into heart rate variability
and how you can use it to improve anxiety, depression, chronic pain,
and a bunch of other health concerns.
You're going to learn what tools you can use to measure HRV.
You'll learn about coherence or resonant frequency, and one specific
skill that improves HRV and anxiety.
So in this video, we're talking about heart rate variability, and
just wanted to remind you all that.
I do have a free grounding skills course on my website.
Go check it out.
If you want to learn more ways to calm your nervous system and get
yourself settled when you have anxiety or trauma or depression, or
some other difficulties that you've.
Okay.
So when we talk about heart rate, it's a measure of your average beats per minute.
So if your heart rate is 60 beats per minute, that means that on average, your
heart is beating one beat per second, but over the course of one minute, your
heart is going to speed up and slow down.
Now, if you watched my previous video on biofeedback, you learned
that when you breathe in your heart beats faster, and when you breathe
out slowly, your heart beats more.
That is heart rate variability.
It's the measure of how much difference there is between your
fast heartbeats and your slow ones.
But HRV is much cooler than that.
HPV is basically a measure of how good your nervous system is at a desk.
It's a measure of its ability to switch between the parasympathetic
and the sympathetic states.
So a higher heart rate variability means that you're healthier, you're more
resilient, and you're able to adapt to your circumstances and calm yourself.
Now learning to improve your heart rate, variability can help with anxiety, stress,
and depression, and it can also help with getting into the flow and performing.
It can help with chronic pain management and it can help kids with aches.
And I mean, it can help with overall gut health.
Elite athletes use HRV to tell them when they're ready to do another
hard workout and high-performing professionals use it to manage stress.
So why is heart rate variability so important?
It all comes down to your nervous system.
So your heart rate is determined by the autonomic nervous system.
This is the subconscious part of your nervous system that handles
90% of your body's functioning.
So this includes your stress response, your digestion, your
immune system, and so much.
Now the autonomic nervous system has two main states fight or
flight and rest and digest.
When your body senses a threat or a need to perform, it kicks on the
sympathetic state, the fight flight, freeze response, stress chemicals,
like adrenaline and cortisol.
These increase the heart rate and they send blood to the big muscles and then
make you start sweating to cool down, which is why your hands get cold again.
This activated state is great in small doses and it helps you take
action and get excited and perform.
But if you can't calm down, you get stuck in chronic stress, which is not great.
This can lead to problems with your immune system, with your gut,
your muscle tension, and overall, it makes your body less help.
But your body and your nervous system have a natural counterbalancing response.
This is the parasympathetic response, the rest and digest response.
You relax and your body heals and it digests food.
And it turns on your immune system, your nervous system pumps out, settle.
Coaling this messages, your heart decrease how fast it's beating.
And it turns on peristalsis, which helps turn on your digest.
So a high HRV is essentially a numerical measure of how good you are
at switching between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic state.
Having a high HRV means that your body is healthy and adaptable.
Your nervous system is healthy and it can turn on when needed.
And then it relax when needed high HRV can feel like a flow state where
you're engaged and active and clear.
And controlled studies show that high HRV improves anxiety,
depression, asthma, fibromyalgia, chronic pain sleep, et cetera.
So people with a high HRV are better at regulating their emotions.
They're better at controlling their impulses and they're
better at processing information.
But if your heart rate variability is constantly low, it means that your
body is probably stuck in alert mode or stress mode that your body is devoting
all these resources, all this energy to performance instead of healing, or
that I gestion, or the immune system.
Now, sometimes this is a good thing, right?
Like if you're running a race, you want to stay in the
sympathetic state the whole time.
But if you're trying to relax and just can't, this is.
Great, right.
This can lead to chronic stress or exhaustion and trauma, PTSD, and
chronic stress can all lead to a lower HRV, which makes sense, because you're
often stuck in this sympathetic, in this fight flight freeze state.
Now it is also possible to get stuck in the parasympathetic state or get stuck
in freeze mode where you feel frozen or trapped or numb, and you have really
hard time getting motivated or activated.
Yeah.
Lo HRV is associated with all kinds of physical problems, things like
cancer, inflammation, blood pressure, it's connected to depression,
chronic stress pain, low emotional flexibility, anxiety, and quicker aging.
Now there are a lot of factors that impact your HR.
These are things like your age, your physical fitness, alcohol use, sleep,
nutrition, stress, and genetics, but you can learn to improve your HRV
using some really simple exercises.
So let's talk about.
Okay.
So HRV is used as a health marker and it generally decreases with age.
It's also a measure of vagal tone, as we've talked about, right?
Your vagus nerve helps you turn on that parasympathetic response
and you can basically train your vagal nerve to be strong.
There was a couple of ways to do this.
Practicing mindfulness and meditation and yoga and breath work are always
to stimulate the vagus nerve.
But heart rate variability gives you a way to see, to quantify the
effectiveness of those techniques.
You can see on a screen what's physically going on with your body.
So thanks to this measure, researchers have been able to find out what aspect
of these exercises is most effective.
And while they all have very.
Benefits slow paced.
Breathing is one of the most effective ways to improve your HRV.
It's as simple as breathing at around six breaths per minute.
So that means about five seconds to breathe in and five seconds to breathe.
Breathing at the slow rate can get you into a state of cardiac coherence.
So cardiac coherence is when your body's systems take on a
smooth, steady, synchronized wave.
Now, normally your breathing, your heart rate and your blood pressure,
they all have an oscillation or a wave.
Your breathing rate goes in and out.
Your heart rate goes up and down and your barrel reflects, which is essential.
Blood pressure.
It also goes up and down.
And when we're stressed, each of these systems is kind of doing its own thing.
They're all going on and off at different times.
But when you get into cardiac coherence, your heart.
Respiratory rate and blood pressure.
They all sync up and they smoothly interact with each other.
When they get in sync, this is called the resonance frequency.
And when you get into this resonant frequency, you're basically telling
your body your safe, you can calm down and it tells your nervous system to
turn on that rest and digest response.
Now the easiest way to achieve this is through resonance frequency breathing,
which is basically slowing down your breathing to match your heart rate.
And you can feel it when your body feels calmer.
It feels more centered and more settled, which is writing this video reminded
me to breathe more slowly, which helped me get settled over and over again.
Now this can get really technical.
And if you want to learn more, definitely check out the work by Dr.
. He has put years of study into this.
Here's an image from one of his publications showing how the breathing
and the heart rate get into sync.
And you can see the heart rate changing in this sign, wave pattern and the
breathing sinking up with it and everything just kind of smooths out.
This, this is good, right?
This is what we want to go for.
It's good for your body and it's good for your mind.
Okay.
So let's talk about how to check your HRV.
The easiest way to check your heart rate variability is to buy a Bluetooth
heart rate monitor, and then you can use the free app elite HR.
Now you can also kind of measure your HRV with an apple watch,
but it isn't that accurate.
And it's not that responsive, but it might be able to give you an idea of
your HRV without buying something new.
So a link to an article in the description below, if you want to learn how to set up.
But if you'd like to actively learn, you know, how to improve your HRV and
to reach that resonant frequency, the most accessible way is through a program
like heart math or Flowly Flowly is a VR system with a heart rate monitor.
And it walks you through the process of finding your resonant frequency.
This app was funded by a grant from the NIH, and it gradually teaches you how
to soothe your nervous system by giving you feedback on what your state is.
And as you get into a flow state, the scenery changes around you and you
know, it encourages you to keep going.
Now Flowly is not a sponsor, but they did send me the equipment for free.
And I really like what they're doing.
So that's one of the reasons I'm mentioning their work in this.
So to summarize all of this, you can learn to turn on your parasympathetic response.
You can learn to train yourself, to resolve stress and to
strengthen your vagal tone.
And this can have wide ranging positive impacts anywhere from lowering.
It's to proven depression and lots of other physical health benefits.
One of the best things about HRV is that for the logical, you know, quantitative
minded soul, it gives you this concrete measurement, how you're doing it gives
you graphs and charts and a visual for how you're doing instead of this fuzzy idea.
You know, meditation is good for you.
Right.
So if you'd like to try resonant, frequency, breathing, or learn more
about your HRV, then check out some of the resources in the description and
as always thank you for being here.
I love my audience.
All of you, people who are trying to learn new things and improve your life.
So keep up the good work and I will see you next week for part three of this
series on how you can manage chronic pain using heart rate variability and resonant,
frequency, breathing, and biofeedback.
We'll be talking with the creator of Flowly.
So she has done research on this topic for over half a decade.
So excited for that.
Look forward to seeing you then thank you for watching.