I’ve quit jobs over “stress”, a euphamism for fear I can’t ignore. I’ve lived at the mercy of a mind that can’t let go. Neither exercise or alcohol could make a dent. In 20 minutes of meditation I’d hear nothing over my own thought.

Josh Waitzkin advocates HRV training, and decided I’d give it another go.

What’s HRV?

Heart Rate Variability is how inconsistently your heart beats. Less metronomic means more adaptive. Higher variability indicates nervous regulation and recovery. Importantly, it is a quantitative indicator of stress and recovery.

I later discoverd that my HRV had been historically low, indicating unhealthy levels of neurological stress.

Training

HRV training is usually done with a heart rate monitor, breathing & observing your HRV in real time. The kit created friction for me. I didn’t want to charge and wear a heart rate monitor every time I needed calm.

Resonant Frequency

We all have an individual, optimum breathing rate, which syncs with various biological systems to boost HRV. I figured mine out with a cheap Kyto heart monitor from Amazon, and a £10 app called HRV4Biofeedback.

Mine is 5s in, 6s out.

Armed with this, I boiled training down to breathing this frequency. I made a resonant breathing guide that I designed to be calming, but any interval timer will do. Now I could train anywhere.

And breath

The first time I tried it, I got tingling lips and an ungodly sense of peace. Reality was there, but retreated some distance. I could see my worries, but I didn’t feel impending doom. I could forget them for a while, and think them through in my own time.

6 minutes every day (5 felt too little) and I have peace. What a gift, to escape the tyranny of fear.

I’ve never slept so well, and I have a 3-month-old baby beside me nowadays.

Feedback

To simplify, I cut out the monitor & biofeedback that is usually a part of HRV training. The feeling was the feedback.

It turns out my Garmin has been tracking my HRV for me, which is how I discovered my existing low HRV, and has tracked marked improvements in the subsequent weeks.

A human being is only breath and shadow.