BE SMART WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR HEART
In an age where smartphones and technology are used for nearly most things, including paying for your shopping (using your watch!) to listening to an audiobook or watching your favourite show on your commute to work. You can also use your phone, smartwatches and other devices that link to your phone to track:
- Sleep patterns
- Heart rate
- Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
- Stress levels
- Menstrual cycle
- Fertility window
- Step count
- Glucose level
- Mental health
Being alive having this information at your fingertips is truly amazing. Why though?
Your overall health is the sum of all the small choices you make each day, known as your ‘lifestyle’. This includes what you eat, how much you sleep and the quality of it, how much you move and exercise and how often you practise breathing techniques/meditation to help calm your mind and manage your stress levels.
So being able to track and measure most of these things puts you in a great position, to help you make daily decisions to make improvements with your health. Helping increase your understanding and knowledge. The more you understand about your health the more likely you will be empowered to make positive meaningful changes to your behaviour, that will benefit your health.
WHY DO I NEED TO TRACK THESE THINGS THOUGH?
Tracking things, or work in progress, help you achieve your goals. If things don’t get tracked, or recorded, how do you know if you are going in the right direction, or making any progress at all?
For example, if you set a health goal this January of having more energy, improved quality of sleep, learn to manage stress better and lose 5kg of weight. Without tracking these things, they would be very difficult to achieve.
Yes, of course, you can use old fashion pen and paper (which is something I do daily, combined with the data recorded on my smartphone/computer), however, you will be limited to what data you can record and use to your advantage.
Being able to track things that we need to do so as to move in the right direction is key to success. In the example given, you could use apps to measure sleep patterns, step count, measure your HRV and practice daily guided meditation, to help reach your goal. This will make it a lot easier. I have found from personal experience if it’s not recorded somewhere, it either doesn’t get done, or very little progress is made. Without the regular tracking of what and how we are doing, we are not able to see if our actions are taking us closer towards our goals in hand.
Being able to track all these things can act as a great tool to motivate behavioural changes, creating more awareness of how you live and think. If you don’t know how many steps you are doing a day, how do you know how many more you need to do to help you lose that weight? If you don’t know how well you are sleeping, how do you know what you need to do to help change this?
HEART RATE VARIABILITY (HRV)
The last post titled 'Breathwork' touched upon the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Measuring your HRV gives you an insight into the balance between your parasympathetic nervous system and sympathetic nervous system. To recap, your parasympathetic nervous system is the rest and digest part of your ANS and your sympathetic nervous system is your bodies stress response, known as ‘fight or flight’. HRV is the variation between heartbeats which is controlled by the ANS.
Stress defined by Kenneth Hambly, is a maladaptive state in which the sympathetic nervous system is overactivated, causing acute or chronic physical, psychological, and behavioural impairment (Capkin, 2000). We need stress in our lives, without it we wouldn’t survive. The thing we don’t need is to over-activate this response. Easily said than done. In an age where we are bombarded with situations on a daily, even hourly basis that trigger our primal survival mechanism, once used to save us getting eaten by a lion or a bear.
Having a window that allows you to see how you are handling all this stress is a great tool to have. HRV is this window. After observing and looking through this window you are then in a better position to modify your behaviours to help improve you HRV. Giving you more resilience and behavioural flexibility, to cope with whatever life throws at you and we are all too familiar with life throwing things at us!
Normally HRV should increase when you are doing relaxing activities, such as sleep or meditation (parasympathetic dominate). During times of stress HRV decreases, this sympathetic activity helps the body keep up with the demand.
HIGH HRV
Relaxing/meditating
Sleeping
Parasympathetic nervous system
Slow heartbeat
LOW HRV
Times of stress
Exercise
Sympathetic nervous system
Fast heartbeat
BOTTOM LINE
Your HRV changes naturally from day to day, based on what you are doing. It is only when your body gets out of sync and is chronically stressed and loses the balance between the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system it becomes an issue. With your body stuck in its stress response, fight or flight, with the associated stress hormones while you are resting. This takes vital energy away from being able to carry out your bodies normal functions, as a result, illness and disease can emerge.
If you know what disrupts this balance you are in a better position to make changes to modify behaviour to help maintain equilibrium.
· Poor sleep
· Increased stress (mental/physical)
· Unhealthy diet
· Lack of exercise
Are some of the main ones and can easily be tracked. With knowledge and understanding of what’s going on in your body, you can make the necessary lifestyle changes to improve your health. Ignorance can be bliss, but when we have so much technology at our fingertips to possibly increase our life expectancy, ignorance is unwise.
This leads nicely on to next week’s blog which will be about stress and its effect on the body!
REFERENCES
Campkin M. (2000). Stress management in primary care. Fam Pract;17: 98-99.
Kim H, Cheon E, Bai D, Lee Y and Koo B. (2018). Stress and Heart Rate Variability: A Meta-Analysis and Review of the Literature. Psychiatry Investig;15(3):235-245