HRV Revolution

health

Nov 15

HRV — Heart Rate Variability — is often misunderstood, and mismanaged, when it comes to the care of our health. For example, here are several reputable resources trying to explain the new significance of HRV in our daily lives:

HRV is defined as the physiological variation in the duration of intervals between sinus beats. It reflects the combined activity of sympathetic and parasympathetic tone on HR and serves as a measurable indicator of cardiovascular integrity and prognosis. Formal criteria for HRV and comparison of variables were developed by a joint task force between the European Society of Cardiology and the North American Society of Pacing and Electrophysiology in 1996 and updated in 2015. The update added newer methods, including fractal and chaos analysis, and highlighted the disconnection between biomedical engineering developments and their application to clinical disease states. The major methods of analysis can be divided into time-domain (subdivided into statistical and geometric approaches) and frequency-domain methods.

Simple, right?

Ooof.

Here’s, perhaps a more refined definition:

Your heart beats at a specific rate at all times. That rate changes depending on what you're doing at the time. Slower heart rates happen when you're resting or relaxed, and faster rates happen when you're active, stressed or when you’re in danger. There is variability in your heart rate based on the needs of your body and your respiratory patterns. Certain medications and medical devices — such as pacemakers — can also affect your heart rate variability. Your heart rate variability also tends to decrease normally as you get older.
Whether you’re awake or asleep, calm or stressed, your heart has to be able to react to changes in your life and surroundings. But it doesn’t know when to react on its own, so it relies on another body system for help.

Now that’s a little clearer, and most concise.

Sometimes, though, you need to hear the same information twice, but in a slightly different way:

HRV is simply a measure of the variation in time between each heartbeat. This variation is controlled by a primitive part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system (ANS). It works behind the scenes, automatically regulating our heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and digestion among other key tasks. The ANS is subdivided into two large components: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the fight-or-flight mechanism and the relaxation response.
The brain is constantly processing information in a region called the hypothalamus. The ANS provides signals to the hypothalamus, which then instructs the rest of the body either to stimulate or to relax different functions. It responds not only to a poor night of sleep, or that sour interaction with your boss, but also to the exciting news that you got engaged, or to that delicious healthy meal you had for lunch. Our body handles all kinds of stimuli and life goes on. However, if we have persistent instigators such as stress, poor sleep, unhealthy diet, dysfunctional relationships, isolation or solitude, and lack of exercise, this balance may be disrupted, and your fight-or-flight response can shift into overdrive.

Here’s my attempt at explaining HRV.

HRV is a complicated way to simply determine the health of your heart. Does your heart rest well? Then your HRV number, in comparison with your own numbers over time, will be higher. Sleep well. Eat right. Get a lot of aerobic exercise and your HRV can readily improve — improve by resting more between beats.

Don’t compare your HRV with anyone else’s — that is a problem many of us have, we want to know how we add up to others in our community, or age group — well, with HRV, we only compare ourselves to our own readings over time. That’s why it’s important to record our HRV in a reliable way for memory and reference.

Some people have an HRV rate of 125. Others have an HRV rate of 2. Both are healthy in context. Sure, higher is better, but only in theoretical comparison with your own HRV in definition. What works well for one person sometimes is just not in the same time and space for another person.

Find a good HRV monitor, and then regularly record what’s happening. Passively recording HRV while you sleep is best practice, and good execution. Make it happen. For the best interest of you, and your variable HRV.