How To Improve Your Heart Rate Variability
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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™:
- A good diet (that avoids processed foods)
- Good exercise (that includes daily physical activity—more often is more important than more intense!)
- Good sleep (7–9 hours of good quality sleep per night)
- Reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption (this is dose-dependent; any reduction is an improvement)
- 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
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Almonds vs Walnuts – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing almonds to walnuts, we picked the almonds.
Why?
It wasn’t just our almond bias, but it was close!
In terms of macros, the main important differences are:
- Almonds are higher in protein
- Walnuts are higher in fats (they are healthy fats)
So far, so even.
In terms of vitamins, both are rich in many vitamins; mostly the same ones. However, walnuts have more of most of the B vitamins (except for B2 and B3, where almonds win easily), and almonds have more vitamin E by several orders of magnitude.
So far, so balanced.
Almonds have slightly more choline.
Almonds have a better mineral profile, with more of most minerals that they both contain, and especially, a lot more calcium.
Both nuts have [sometimes slightly different, but] comparable benefits against diabetes, cancer, neurodegeneration, and other diseases.
In summary
This one’s close. After balancing out the various “almonds have this but walnuts have that” equal-but-different benefits, we’re going to say almonds take first place by virtue of the better mineral profile, and more choline.
But: enjoy both!
Learn more
You might like this previous article of ours:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
Take care!
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Puritans Pride Resveratrol vs Life Extension Resveratrol – Which is Healthier
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Our Verdict
When comparing Puritan’s Pride Resveratrol to Life Extension Resveratrol, we picked the Life Extension Resveratrol.
Why?
It contains not only more resveratrol per serving (250mg compared to Puritan’s Pride’s 100mg), but also contains other goodies too. Specifically, each capsule also contains:
- Quercetin (150mg)
- Grape & berry blend (85mg)
- Fisetin (10mg)
Whereas the Puritan’s Pride softgels? The other top ingredients are soybean oil and gelatin.
Want to check out the products for yourself? Here they are:
Puritan’s Pride Resveratrol | Life Extension Resveratrol
Want to know more about these supplements? Check out:
Resveratrol & Healthy Aging
Fight Inflammation & Protect Your Brain, With Quercetin
Berries & Other Polyphenol-rich Foods
Fisetin: The Anti-Aging AssassinEnjoy!
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Optimal Black Pepper Dosage and Supplement
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝I may have missed it, but how much black pepper provides benefits?❞
So, for any new subscribers joining us today, this is about two recent main features:
As for a daily dosage of black pepper, it varies depending on the benefit you’re looking for, but:
- 5–20mg of piperine is the dosage range used in most scientific studies we looked at
- 10mg is a very common dosage found in many popular supplements
- That’s the mass of piperine though, so if taking it as actual black pepper rather than as an extract, ½ teaspoon is considered sufficient to enjoy benefits.
❝I loved the health benefits of pepper. I do not like pepper. Where can I get it as a supplement?❞
You can simply buy whole black peppercorns and take a few with water as though they were tablets. Your stomach acid will do the rest. Black pepper is also good for digestion, so taking it with a meal is best.
You can buy piperine (black pepper extract) by itself as a supplement in powder form, but if you don’t like black pepper, you will probably not like this powder either. We couldn’t find it readily in capsule form.
You can buy piperine (black pepper extract) as an adjunct to other supplements, with perhaps the most common/popular being turmeric capsules that also contain 10mg (or more) piperine per capsule. Shop around if you like, but here’s one that has 15mg piperine* per capsule, for example.
*They call it “Bioperine®” but that is literally just piperine. Same go
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16/8 Intermittent Fasting For Beginners
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Health Insider explains in super-simple fashion why and how to do Intermittent Fasting (IF), which is something that can sound complicated at first, but becomes very simple and easy once understood.
What do we need to know?
Intermittent fasting (IF) is a good, well-evidenced way to ease your body’s metabolic load, and
give your organs a chance to recover from the strain of digestion and its effects. That’s not just your gastrointestinal organs! It’s your pancreas and liver too, amongst others—this is about glucose metabolism as much as it is about digestion.This, in turn, allows your body some downtime to do its favorite thing, which is: maintenance!
This maintenance takes the form of enhanced cellular apoptosis and autophagy, helping to keep cells young and cancer-free.
In other words, with well-practised intermittent fasting, we can reduce our risk of metabolic disease (including heart disease and diabetes) as well as cancer and neurodegeneration.
You may be wondering: this sounds miraculous; what’s the catch? There are a couple:
- While fasting from food, the body’s enhanced metabolism requires more water, so you’ll need to take extra care keep on top of your hydration (this is one reason why Ramadan fasting, while healthy for most people, is not as healthy as IF—because Ramadan fasting means abstaining from water, too).
- If you are diabetic, and especially if you have Type 1 Diabetes, fasting may not be a safe option for you, since if you get a hypo in the middle of your fasting period, it’s obviously not a good idea to wait another many hours before fixing it.
Extra note on that last one: it’s easy to think “can’t I just lower my bolus insulin instead of eating?” and while superficially yes that will raise your blood sugar levels, it’s because the sugar will be sticking around in your blood, and not actually getting released into the organs that need it. So while your blood glucose monitor may say you’re fine, you will be starving your organs and if you keep it up they may suffer serious damage.
Disclaimer: our standard legal/medical disclaimer applies, and this is intended for educational purposes only; please do speak with your endocrinologist before changing anything you usually do with regard to your blood sugar maintenance.
Ok, back onto the cheerier topic at hand:
Aside from the above: for most people, IF is a remarkably healthful practice in very many ways.
For more on the science, practicalities, and things to do/avoid, enjoy this short (4:53) video:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically
Want to know more?
Check out our previous main feature on this topic:
Intermittent Fasting: Mythbusting Edition
Enjoy!
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Lucid Dreaming: How To Do It, & Why
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Lucid Dreaming: Methods & Uses
We’ve written about dreaming more generally before:
Today we’re going to be talking more about a subject we’ve only touched on previously: lucid dreaming
What it is: lucid dreaming is the practice of being mentally awake while dreaming, with awareness that it is a dream, and control over the dream.
Why is it useful? Beyond simply being fun, it can banish nightmares, it can improve one’s relationship with sleep (always something to look forward to, and sleep doesn’t feel like a waste of time at all!), and it can allow for exploring a lot of things that can’t easily be explored otherwise—which can be quite therapeutic.
How to do it
There are various ways to induce lucid dreaming, but the most common and “entry-level” method is called Mnemonic-Induced Lucid Dreaming (MILD).
MILD involves having some means of remembering what one has forgotten, i.e., that one is dreaming. To break it down further, first we’ll need to learn how to perform a reality check. Again, there are many of these, but one of the simplest is to ask yourself:
How did I get here?
- If you can retrace your steps with relative ease and the story of how you got here does not sound too much like a dream sequence, you are probably not dreaming.
- If you are dreaming, however, chances are that nothing actually led to where you are now; you just appeared here.
Other reality checks include checking whether books, clocks, and/or lightswitches work as they should—all are notorious for often being broken in dreams; books have gibberish or missing or repeated text; clocks do not tell the correct time and often do not even tell a time that could be real (e.g: 07:72), and lightswitches may turn a light on/off without actually changing the level of illumination in the room.
Now, a reality check is only useful if you actually perform it, so this is where MILD comes in.
You need to make a habit of doing a reality check frequently. Whenever you remember, it’s a good time to do a reality check, but you should also try tying it to something. Many people use a red light, because then they can also use a timed red light during the night to subconsciously cue them that they are dreaming. But it could be as simple as “whenever I go to the bathroom, I do a reality check”.
With this in mind, a fun method that has extra benefits is to try to use a magical power, such as psychokinesis. If (while fully awake) whenever you go to pick up some object you imagine it just wooshing magically to meet your hand halfway, then at some point you’ll instinctively do that while dreaming, and it’ll stand a good chance of working—and thus cluing you in that you are dreaming.
How to stay lucid
When you awaken within a dream (i.e. become lucid), there’s a good chance of one of two things happening quickly:
- you forget again
- you wake up
So when you realize you are dreaming, do two things at once:
- verbally repeat to yourself “I am dreaming now”. This will help stretch your awareness from one second to the next.
- look at your hands, and touch things, especially the floor and/or walls. This will help to ground you within the dream.
Things to do while lucid
Flying is a good fun entry-level activity; it’s very common to initially find it difficult though, and only be able to lift up very slightly before gently falling down, or things like that. A good tip is: instead of trying to move yourself, you stay still and move the dream around you, as though you are rotating a 3D model (because guess what: you are).
Confronting your nightmares and/or general fears is a good thing for many. Think, while you’re still awake during the day, about what you would do about the source/trigger of your fear if you had magical powers. Whatever you choose, keep it consistent for now, because this is about habit-forming.
Example: let’s say there’s a person from your past who appears in your nightmares. Let’s say your chosen magic would be “I would cause the ground to open up, swallow them, and close again behind them”. Vividly imagine that whenever they come to mind while you are awake, and when you encounter them next in a nightmare, you’ll remember to do exactly that, and it’ll work.
Learning about your own subconscious is a more advanced activity, but once you’re used to lucid dreaming, you can remember that everything in there is an internal projection of your own mind, so you can literally talk to parts of your subconscious, including past versions of yourself, or singular parts of your greater-whole personality, as per IFS:
Take Care Of Your “Unwanted” Parts Too!
Want to know more?
You might like to read:
Enjoy!
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5 Minute Posture Improvement Routine!
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McKay Lang walks us through it:
Step by Step
Breathing exercise:
- Place your hands on your lower abdomen.
- Take three deep breaths, focusing on body tension in the shoulders and neck… And release.
Shoulder squeeze:
- With your hands on your hips, inhale and squeeze your shoulders upwards.
- Hold your breath for 3–4 seconds, then exhale.
- Repeat two more times, holding the squeeze a little longer each time.
Upper shoulder massage:
- Massage your upper shoulder muscles to release tension stored there.
Overhead arm stretch:
- Raise your arms above your head, clasping each elbow with the opposite hand.
- Inhale deeply, stretch upwards, then exhale and release.
- Repeat, alternating elbows.
Neck and head push:
- Place your palms on the back of the head, and push your head into your hands (and vice versa, because of Newton’s Third Law of Motion).
- Do the same sideways (one side and then the other), to engage the other neck muscles.
Cool down:
- Gently unclasp your hands, bring your head upright, and massage your muscles. And breathe.
For variations and a visual demonstration of all, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
6 Ways To Look After Your Back
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
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