Heart rate variability is different to heart rate. Your heart rate is measured in beats per second, and is the average over a minute. Generally speaking, a lower heart rate suggests rest and relaxation, and a higher heart rate indicates stress, exercise or exertion.

Heart rate variability, on the other hand, measures the specific changes in time (or variability) between successive heart beats. Generally, a low heart rate variability indicates your body is under a lot of stress, whether it be from from exercise, psychological events, or other internal or external stressors. A high heart rate variability indicates that the body has a strong ability to tolerate stress, or is in a recovery state.

At rest, a high HRV is generally favorable and a low HRV is unfavorable. When in an active state, lower relative HRV is generally favorable while a high HRV can be unfavorable.

Heart Rate Variability tells me the state of your autonomic nervous system

The autonomic nervous system is tied to every automatic process in the body, and comprises of two main branches that control the body’s stress and recovery processes. It regulates blood sugar, body temperature, blood pressure, sweat, digestion, and much more.

When looking at your individual heart rate variability, what it tells me is how stressed or burnt out your system is, or on the other hand, how resilient you are to stress. When your heart rate variability is low, it can take longer to improve your health outcomes as compared to someone with high HRV.

Increasing your Heart Rate Variability

It is a goal with all of my personal clients that we improve their heart rate variability. This can be done through many measures, as a lot of things can impact the tone of your nervous system. In fact, my entire physical examination is searching for stressors in your system that I can have an impact on, thereby helping you to have a higher HRV.

In my practice, I utilise Applied Kinesiology and functional neurology to remove any physical and biochemical barriers to improving heart rate variability. I follow this up with HeartMath training programs, to actively teach you how to improve you HRV (thereby needing me less).

Measuring your HRV

It is best to measure your HRV at the same time each day, preferably in the morning. If you work alongside me to have a home device, I would encourage you to measure your HRV before you even get out of bed. A reading first thing in the morning can help you determine whether you need a more restful, ‘stress-management’ kind of day, or if you have enough battery life in your system to have a busy day, with higher intensity exercise included.

When it comes to measuring your HRV in practice, we will aim to measure it at the same time each assessment, so that daily rhythms can be assumed to be similar.

One of the easiest and quickest way to increase your HRV is to stimulate your vagus nerve, check out this blog post to learn more.