How To Improve Your Heart Rate Variability

How’s your heart rate variability?

The hallmarks of a good, strong cardiovascular system include a medium-to-low resting heart rate (for adults: under 60 beats per minute is good; under 50 is typical of athletes), and healthy blood pressure (for adults: under 120/80, while still above 90/60, is generally considered good).

Less talked-about is heart rate variability, but it’s important too…

What is heart rate variability?

Heart rate variability is a measure of how quickly and easily your heart responds to changes in demands placed upon it. For example:

• If you’re at rest and then start running your fastest (be it for leisure or survival or anything in between), your heart rate should be able to jump from its resting rate to about 180% of that as quickly as possible
• When you stop, your heart rate should be able to shift gears back to your resting rate as quickly as possible

The same goes, to a commensurately lesser extent, to changes in activity between low and moderate, or between moderate and high.

• When your heart can change gears quickly, that’s called a high heart rate variability
• When your heart is sluggish to get going and then takes a while to return to normal after exertion, that’s called a low heart rate variability.

The rate of change (i.e., the variability) is measured in microseconds per beat, and the actual numbers will vary depending on a lot of factors, but for everyone, higher is better than lower.

Aside from quick response to crises, why does it matter?

If heart rate variability is low, it means the sympathetic nervous system is dominating the parasympathetic nervous system, which means, in lay terms, your fight-or-flight response is overriding your ability to relax.

See for example: Stress and Heart Rate Variability: A Meta-Analysis and Review of the Literature

This has a lot of knock-on effects for both physical and mental health! Your heart and brain will take the worst of this damage, so it’s good to improve things for them impossible.

This Saturday’s Life Hacks: how to improve your HRV!

Firstly, the Usual Five Things™:

1. A good diet (that avoids processed foods)
2. Good exercise (that includes daily physical activity—more often is more important than more intense!)
3. Good sleep (7–9 hours of good quality sleep per night)
4. Reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption (this is dose-dependent; any reduction is an improvement)
5. Don’t smoke (just don’t)

Additional regular habits that help a lot:

• Breathing exercises, mindfulness, meditation
• Therapy, especially CBT and DBT
• Stress-avoidance strategies, for example:
  • Get (and maintain) your finances in good order
  • Get (and maintain) your relationship(s) in good order
  • Get (and maintain) your working* life in good order

*Whatever this means to you. If you’re perhaps retired, or otherwise a home-maker, or even a student, the things you “need to do” on a daily basis are your working life, for these purposes.

In terms of simple, quick-fix, physical tweaks to focus on if you’re already broadly leading a good life, two great ones are:

• Exercise: get moving! Walk to the store even if you buy nothing but a snack or drink to enjoy while walking back. If you drove, make more trips with the shopping bags rather than fewer. If you like to watch TV, consider an exercise bike or treadmill to use while watching. If you have a partner, double-up and make it a thing you do together! Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Take the scenic route when walking someplace. Go to the bathroom that’s further away. Every little helps!
• Breathe: even just a couple of times a day, practice mindful breathing. Start with even just a minute a day, to get the habit going. What breathing exercise you do isn’t so important as that you do it. Notice your breathing; count how long each breath takes. Don’t worry about “doing it right”—you’re doing great, just observe, just notice, just slowly count. We promise that regular practice of this will have you feeling amazing