All these things happen automatically because your body is biologically programmed to respond to stress as if you’re in physical danger. The autonomic nervous system (ANS)—the master controller of those bodily functions that occur without thought, such as breathing, heart rate, and digestion—begins preparing you to either fight or flee. This is called the fight-or-flight response.
Here’s the problem, though—none of the stressful situations I mentioned above actually require fighting or fleeing. And the fight-or-flight response leaves you in a physiological state that is hardly conducive to peak performance. It’s nearly impossible to think clearly, make wise decisions, and perform confidently when your heart is racing, your breathing is ragged, and your hands are shaking. Surely, you’ve experienced this firsthand.
A critical part of our work together will be developing your somatic awareness—a heightened consciousness of how your body is feeling—so that you will recognize when you are stressed and can take action to shift yourself out of a state of stress and into what is called parasympathetic dominance
We’ll start by using technology to help you find your ideal breathing rate, but with dedicated practice, you’ll be able to breathe without the technology, accessing your best self on demand and linking together your heart, breath, and mind in the way nature intended.
Most people are under the impression that their heart beats with the monotony and repetitiveness of a metronome. On the contrary, when you inhale, your heart rate (the number of times your heart beats per minute) naturally rises; when you exhale, it slows down again. This is true for everyone
But the exact amount the heart rate accelerates on inhalation and how quickly it decelerates on exhalation vary quite a bit from person to person. This range from your maximum heart rate to your minimum heart rate is your heart rate variability (HRV).
High heart rate variability is what you need to thrive under pressure; it signifies the body’s ability to quickly ramp up and feel a full range of emotions and energy—including stress, when needed—and then swiftly and efficiently let go, or recover
But prolonged stress decreases heart rate variability, diminishing the amplitude, or height, of your heart rate oscillations
the heart is a muscle with far more responsibility than just pumping blood. It is an essential part of your autonomic nervous system, featuring an acceleration system and a deceleration system that, together, function as your body’s internal braking system. Heart rate variability is an indication of the balance within the two main branches of your autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system
You can think of them as the gas pedal and brake of a car
In order to be able to accelerate and decelerate quickly, like a high-performance racecar, you need balanced and finely tuned sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Yet most adults have a dominant sympathetic nervous system and an underactive parasympathetic nervous system
In 2018, the most Googled medical symptom in the United States was stress, topping the list in one out of every five states
Once you’re ramped up, though, it’s overly difficult for your physiology to recover. You’re driving a car that has no trouble reaching a high speed but is incapable of slowing down
Your physiology—your heart—is what’s immobilizing you. And because your psychological well-being is governed by your physiology, you must address your heart’s response before you can control your emotions or thoughts.
For my clients to master the cognitive changes stemming from our psychological work, I believed, they first needed to learn to control what their hearts were saying to their bodies and brains.
In Heart Breath Mind you have access to a scientifically proven, safe, natural way to increase your HRV and rewire your body’s baseline stress response to perform at your peak level of ability despite pressure or distraction
Our objective is to increase your heart’s ability to effectively and efficiently let go of stress. A key component of this involves relearning how to breathe the way nature intended—from your belly, not your chest
In Heart Breath Mind you will learn how to do the exact same thing with your heart—to train it with specific muscle patterns so that your most important muscle operates flexibly when you’re under stress.
Up until the 1960s and 1970s, the prevailing belief was that communication between the heart and brain was one-sided, with the heart responding to the brain’s commands and not the other way around
we now know that the heart and brain are engaged in a nonstop, bidirectional dialogue, each organ influencing the other’s behavior
For example, McCraty’s research tells us that when our heart rhythm pattern is erratic and disordered, the corresponding pattern of neural signals traveling from the heart to the brain inhibits higher cognitive function. The prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that controls complex cognitive behaviors such as planning and decision making—goes “offline” when you are in a state of fight-or-flight. Evolutionarily speaking, this makes sense; your body prioritizes your survival by making sure you don’t end up in a state of “paralysis by overanalysis” when your life is in danger. Unfortunately, this also impedes your ability to think clearly, remember, learn, reason, and make intelligent decisions
In contrast, a body in rest-and-digest mode, with high heart rate variability, produces a more ordered and stable heart pattern, sending input to the brain that facilitates cognitive functioning and reinforces positive feelings as well as emotional regulation
At its most basic level, heart rate variability (which I’ll refer to as HRV from now on) is a measure of the beat-to-beat changes in the heart. In general, high HRV represents a flexible autonomic nervous system that is responsive to internal and external stimuli and is associated with fast reactions and adaptability
By improving HRV, we can train our bodies to flexibly shift into positive states on demand
Slow and deep breathing does suppress sympathetic activity, but unless you do it systematically, it won’t strengthen the parasympathetic branch at your baseline state. That’s where the braking action happens, thanks to something called the baroreflex
A typical initial HRV biofeedback session in my office would look like this: Your heart rate, respiration, and HRV are all displayed on a large monitor. Once we identify your baseline HRV, our first step is to follow the Lehrer and Vaschillo protocol for identifying your resonance frequency breathing rate (more on that to come in just a moment.)
The baroreflex is fixed and almost entirely mediated by unconscious mechanisms, but we do have control over our breathing rate. Most of us breathe at a faster frequency than our baroreflex, but when we purposefully slow our breathing to match the frequency of our baroreflex, we strengthen our control over it.
It turns out there is a particular rate of breathing, called resonance frequency, that maximizes the amplitudes of heart rate oscillations. For some people, it’s 6 breaths a minute; for others it might be 5 or 7. Regardless of the specific number, when you breathe at this rate, something amazing happens: it strengthens the baroreflex, creating even greater overall increases in HRV.
As you train your heart by breathing at your personal resonance frequency, you are exercising your baroreflex, making it stronger and more efficient so that your HRV remains high even when you resume normal breathing. Breathing
the vast majority—between 80 and 90 percent—of vagal nerve fibers spend their time sending messages “up” from the body to the brain. The phrases “listen to your heart” and “listen to your gut” aren’t just clichés; they’re accurate descriptions of real physiological processes
The strength of your vagus nerve activity is referred to as vagal tone. People with good vagal tone have high HRV and vice versa
Many of us are used to traditional cognitive approaches such as talk therapy, visualization, and goal setting, which call for us to tune into our minds; but the notion of clicking into our heart and asking it how it feels can seem foreign
Anxiety about being hijacked by uncomfortable feelings keeps us paralyzed, and our minds transpose those past sensations onto new situations to seek release
Many of my techniques require you to let go of the mind’s processes, resist the urge to get into your head, and just trust in the somatic work. This is critical because the cognitive approach will block you from generating a
physiological state that can be encoded into your body
The skills in Heart Breath Mind merge the science of HRV biofeedback with novel psychological strategies designed to optimize the way you respond to stressful situations
more than half of us fall within an even tighter range of 5 to 6.5 breaths per minute
In one recent study, subjects were divided into three groups and asked to breathe at different rates for 15 minutes. The first group breathed at their resonance frequency while the second group breathed at 1 breath per minute higher than their resonance frequency; the third group sat quietly for the 15 minutes. Afterward, the group that breathed at their specific, determined resonance frequency reported an elevated mood, lower systolic blood pressure, and other coveted HRV-BFB outcomes.
subjects typically created maximum heart rate oscillations at ~0.1 Hz, achieved by breathing at a frequency of 6 breaths per minute.
HRV reflects the specific changes in time between successive heartbeats. Each discrete time measurement is called an R-R interval (RRI), or interbeat interval, and happens so quickly that it needs to be measured in milliseconds. Your RRI is the distance between one R-spike and the next.
Higher HRV, which reflects more variability or irregularity between heartbeats, indicates a flexible autonomic nervous system that easily and efficiently responds to both internal and external stressors.
Chest straps tend to be the most accurate because the sensors are affixed to the skin to detect electromagnetic signals close to the heart
I recommend that clients use only the breath pacer for daily home practice. In fact, the use of daily HRV tracking can detract from training, causing many of my clients to become overly focused on obtaining a specific result instead of remaining present in the process
The irony here is that for some people, using technology to constantly evaluate HRV daily can cause anxiety
I also suggest that you record your data first thing in the morning, immediately upon waking. Don’t check e-mail first, or start to plan out your day, as stress can alter your measurements. When measuring your HRV, sit upright in bed or a chair, feet on the floor, back straight but relaxed.
Think of it like strength training: Will you gain muscle mass if you start lifting weights for 5 or 10 minutes a day? Sure, a little. But bump that time up to 15 minutes twice a day, and you’ll see significantly more progress. Twenty minutes twice a day? You’re going to develop a reflex that automatically kicks in during stressful moments, allowing you to nimbly navigate whatever issue is at hand
What matters is consistency. Once you determine the time and place that works best for you and begin to practice in it, it will serve as a reminder to do your breathing whenever you are there
The strongest cues or reminders are those built into existing routines. For example, if you make coffee at home each morning, you may say: “After I start the coffee maker, I will do my resonance breathing for 20 minutes.”
Turn all sounds off on your breathing pacer. Breathing pacers typically use sounds like ocean waves, chimes, or white noise to indicate inhales and exhales. They can be needlessly distracting. Just focus on the feeling of your breath. I also recommend turning off your ringer.
Your RMSSD (root mean square of successive differences) is the clinical measure of HRV. (There are other measures of HRV, such as SDNN [standard deviation of time between heartbeats], but for the purpose of this protocol, we will measure HRV via RMSSD.) This measure is considered the most accurate reflection of the autonomic nervous system when tracking over the short term.