Heart Rate Variability
Did you know that it is actually a good thing for the time between your heart beats to vary? Your parasympathetic (rest, digest, autonomic) and sympathetic (fight or flight) should be counterbalancing each other. Both nervous systems should be redirecting toward the heart, the brain, the gut and other organs within nanoseconds. If you have a high heart rate variability (short and longer periods between beats) you know that your resilience is high.
The can be very useful in your journey to health. By measuring your HRV each day, you are able to look at what you have done and what you should do that day.
If your HRV is low, think about what you ate yesterday. An inflammatory diet can reduce your HRV. Did you sleep well? Poor sleep can lower your HRV.
If your HRV is low, it signals the need for some self-care. Try to reduce your stress. Take long walks, meditate, journal. This is the day you need to eat a healthy, balanced diet. This is a day for yoga, not strength training. This is also the day you should avoid alcohol and use a relaxing bedtime routine to ensure you are getting adequate REM sleep.
But if your HRV is high, you are ready to take on the world! You can push yourself at the gym. You can make those hard decisions you’ve been putting off. I would still eat healthy and only drink alcohol in moderation because you want to keep this feeling!
Having a high HRV can improve cognition, reduce your chance of heart disease, reduce anxiety and depression and there is even some research that it can prevent certain types of cancer.
There are devices out there that can assist you in monitoring your HRV and assist you in breathing exercises to improve your HRV. I use HeartMath, but there are others.
The key is to do this at the same time of day consistently. This will allow you to see what negatively affected you the day before, and show you what you need to do for that day.
If this sounds crazy, I understand. As a nurse, I would have called high HRV sinus arrhythmia. This is becoming a well-studied and published area of medicine. Here is an article from the Handbook of Clinical Neurology regarding HRV.