Calming. Effective. Self-Regulation.
How Stress Impacts Us
In today’s day and age, we experience more stress than we were ever equipped to deal with. With constant pressures from work, school, family, relationships, not to mention technology and social media—many of us do not do enough to “reset” and allow our brain and body to recover from the constant stress and pressure. Stress is processed by our Autonomic Nervous System, which is involuntary and is divided into two parts.
The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS)- “fight or flight”, our survival mechanism which allows us to react quickly and protect ourselves from threats (real or perceived). Over time and with chronic low levels of stress, this survival mechanism can begin to over-react to non-threatening situations (daily stressors).
Repeated activation of our fight or flight system can create long-term effects on our brain and body including: high blood pressure, obesity, inflammation, poor memory, poor decision making, impaired attention and concentration, insomnia, emotional dysregulation, mood disorders, self-destructive behaviors and much more.
Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS)- “rest and digest”, allows us to recover from stressful events. We can “reset” imbalance within our Autonomic Nervous System by learning to activate our PNS, we do this through biofeedback. Learning this skill allows us to reverse the negative effects of chronic stress.
What is Biofeedback?
Biofeedback is a technique that can help an individual gain more control over bodily functions that are normally considered involuntary. During a biofeedback session, a person receives “feedback” in the form of auditory and/or visual information that indicates when they are optimally controlling their involuntary functions. In the case of Heart Rate Variability training, we are learning to control the rhythms of the heart. Why would this be important? Read on.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Training through Heartmath*
The Heart–Brain Connection
Most of us have learned that the heart is constantly responding to the brain in the form of neural signals. However, it is not as commonly known that the heart actually sends far more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart! Moreover, these heart signals have a significant effect on brain function – influencing emotional processing as well as higher cognitive faculties such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving. In other words, not only does the heart respond to the brain, but the brain continuously responds to the heart.
The Role of Emotions
Research has demonstrated that different patterns of heart rhythm (which accompany different emotional states) have distinct effects on cognitive and emotional function. During stress and negative emotions, when the heart rhythm pattern is erratic and disordered, the corresponding pattern of neural signals traveling from the heart to the brain inhibits higher cognitive functions. This limits our ability to think clearly, remember, learn, reason, and make effective decisions. (This helps explain why we may often act impulsively and unwisely when we’re under stress.) The heart’s input to the brain during stressful or negative emotions also has a profound effect on the brain’s emotional processes—actually serving to reinforce the emotional experience of stress.
The Power of Self-Regulation
In contrast, the more ordered and stable pattern of the heart’s input to the brain during positive emotional states has the opposite effect—it facilitates cognitive function and reinforces positive feelings, emotional stability and perceptual clarity. This means that learning to generate increased heart rhythm coherence not only benefits the entire body, but also profoundly affects how we perceive, think, feel, and perform.
As the heart rhythms become more coherent (smooth and ordered), it can help release the effects of chronic stress, which often results in the reduction symptoms such as sleep disturbances, hyper arousal, poor emotional regulation and concentration problems.
This YouTube video does an excellent job of explaining HRV if you’d like more information.