How To Improve Your Heart Rate Variability (HRV) - Dr Leah Lagos

What's the history of HRV? Who, who discovered it?

You know, it's really interesting. It originated being a metric that doctors looked at before babies were born to predict the vitality of the, uh, of the unborn baby, that they would be healthy upon birth. And then in time, doctors began using it as a metric of cardiovascular health and other conditions. Uh, HRV is very much associated with clinical conditions from fibromyalgia to irritable bowel syndrome, to depression, to anxiety. And then a cohort, a, a small subset of people, including myself, came along and said, "Well, what about people that aren't afflicted by a condition but just wanted to get better?" And, and that question has been the last 17 years of my research and practice.

Wow. So I think a lot of people listening will be familiar with HRV, what it is, and sort of the, the, the fundamentals. But just give us a 30,000-foot overview recap.

Sure. So HRV has to do with the variability in between each heartbeat. And essentially, the short simple answer, without getting too technical, and I think that's one of the things the public has to understand, people get lost in the science, Kris, is, is that we are looking for bigger numbers from greater health and resilience. But everybody has a range. And, and so the scientific definition, uh, has to do with the oscillatory variability in between each heartbeat, um, and measured in milliseconds. And that's the technical d- definition. What we'll talk about today is HRV in terms of RSA, resonant sinus arrhythmia. And it's so much easier to understand and grasp as a user, because you can look at with all sorts of different wearables that are out now, the peak to trough. So when you inhale, your heart rate goes up, and when you exhale, it goes down. And that phenomenon is known as resonant sinus arrhythmia. And ultimately, we want that variation to be as big and beautiful as possible, almost like ocean-like waves. But that's not exactly what happens in life. We get stuck. There are stressors. And, and we can talk about the different variables in time, but we want to optimize those oscillations to be resilient, adaptable, flexible, um, marked by agility, to, to kind of respond as we need and acclimate flexibly.

Is that what you mean by autonomic flexibility?

It does. It does. And people think about stress in terms of, am I stressed or am I not? (laughs) But what we really should be talking about is your agility in handling it. How long does it last? Are you able to let it go when it happens? How long does it take you? Are there specific stressors that take you longer? And you begin to look at HRV, and we can dive into this e- as deeply as you want, but as a metric that gives you insights about yourself. So of course, we can train HRV, and I'll take you through my protocol for doing that, which is in my book, Heart Breath Mind. But, but I want the world to understand, HRV is a measure of who they are, what amplifies them, what takes away from their natural gifts, and it's, it's a metric that people can calibrate with breathing, but also with study and research on, on what kind of leads to these changes inter- inter day.