In a Heartbeat: The Benefit of Tracking HRV
Picture this: you’re relaxing by the Pacific waters, not a worry in the world, drink in hand, wind blowing through your hair, a relaxed smile on your face. Now imagine yourself putting that drink down and walking into your resort chalet only to find yourself in the middle of an aggressive hotel invasion. Gun shots, running footsteps and loud noises. The gunshots are getting louder, the footsteps heavier, the screams more violent. What do you do? How do you tell your body it’s time to go? It’s time to run!
Our Autonomic Nervous System
Lucky for us, our biopsychosocial make-up has us covered. Using a complex regulatory system called the autonomic nervous system (ANS), our body is able to recognize, acknowledge and regulate both our fight-or flight (“sympathetic nervous system”) and our “chill-out” (“parasympathetic nervous system”) responses. But how our ANS navigates us from feeling absolutely calm and relaxed to a state of being that requires quick thinking and fast action is through Heart Rate Variability (HRV).
Heart Rate Variability and Your Health
It is common knowledge that maintaining a moderate heartbeat is integral to stress management and a healthy heart. But what is less emphasized is Heart Rate Variability (HRV), and its benefits for a healthy heart. HRV is our heart’s ability to change its rate of pumping blood (i.e., beats per minute), based on our constantly changing state of being. If it wasn’t for HRV, you would not be able to realize and effectively instruct your body to ‘RUN!’ upon entering a high-threat situation or environment, just as when you walked into that hypothetical hotel invasion. If it wasn’t for HRV, you also would not be able to realize when you can stop to breathe and relax, once securely transported to a safe area, free of any threat. So, despite having heard “the lower the better” when it comes to heart rate, heart rate variability, i.e., the heart’s capacity to switch between states of being, follows the principle of “the more the merrier”. The higher one’s heart rate variability, the better that person’s body is at switching between bodily states often influenced by one’s environment. Evolutionarily too, we have been designed, from the cavemen ages to efficiently switch gears “in a heartbeat”. Thus, having high HRV is a sign of a healthy heart, one that can bounce back from stressors fast and effectively and, one that can regulate your body efficiently in light of new changes.