Issue 109: Listen to Your Heart: Stress Resilience for Body, Mind, & Spirit

I integrate lifestyle practices into my nutrition recommendations to address the wellbeing of body, mind, and spirit. Two words capture this approach: stress resilience.

This issue opens a peephole into profound, lasting stress resilience, habits of being that can serve you well through 2024 and beyond! My source here, Transforming Stress by Doc Childre and Deborah Roma, Ph.D., shows the research behind one of my key tools, HeartMath.

As always, please write to me with your thoughts and questions! I love hearing from you.

In Wellness,  Mary Virginia

---

From ancient times, the heart has been identified as the seat of emotion. You’ve probably used terms like “heartfelt” and “from the heart” in your daily language to describe the warmth of a positive emotion. We also express sentiments like “that hurts my heart.”

But did you know that these feelings and sensations are much more than emotion? They are literal communications from the body to the brain - messages of safety and security or those of disconnection and distress. Those communications have everything to do with our thoughts, focus, decision-making, and mood.

HeartMath is a healing practice that reorients these communications from the heart to the brain to create focus, clarity, reason, and balanced mood in the face of hard things. Instead of reacting, we respond thoughtfully, from the heart.

HeartMath

The autonomic nervous system has two branches, sympathetic and parasympathetic, that coordinate to keep us running. Hearts beat, lungs breathe, eyes blink, digestive tract digests, etc. Most of the time we’re not even aware these are happening. One of the few places where we can control how it happens is with our breath.

HeartMath accesses breath and harnesses it to our imaginative ability to call forth positive, regenerative emotions based on our experiences. An example is the Heart Lock-In technique. We focus on breath flowing in and out of the heart. We call forth a heartfelt sensation - love, appreciation, care, compassion, or any positive, healing emotion - that we allow to flow with the breath. It’s important to understand that during the practice we want the sensation of the emotion, not the intellectual memory. That is, the practice lives in the heart, not in the head. We measure the results of the practice through heart rate variability (HRV), which I describe below.

A high HRV ultimately directs the release of serotonin, dopamine, and hormones, changes the mechanical heart beat, and alters the heart’s electromagnetic field. (If you want a deeper dive, go here.) Moreover, the PENI systems (read about it in my prior newsletter here) begin to function optimally. Voilå - stress resilience.

Heart  Intelligence

The heart communicates emotional status to the brain in four different ways.

• Neurologically: The heart has its own nervous system, truly its own brain, that sends signals about what’s happening in the body to the brain through the vagus nerve (more about the vagus nerve below). It reflects our emotions, our response to physical internal experiences (like what we ate or being sick), and external experiences (like a hug or a car running a red light). The ‘heart brain’ has the same receptors for hormones, immune molecules, neurotransmitters, and peptides associated with emotion (which I talk about here) that the brain has.
  
• Biochemically: Hormones, immune molecules, and neurotransmitters produced in the heart in response to the body’s experience travel through the blood and nervous systems up to the brain to communicate their messages.
  

• Mechanically: This is the pulse wave through the bloodstream that is generated by the heartbeat. Think of systolic and diastolic blood pressure measurements: those are the pulse waves. The brain ‘reads’ the waves for information in order to maintain appropriate pressure within the rigid cranium. This is called ‘interoception,’ or the body’s and our own conscious awareness of internal processes so we can make adjustments. As pulse waves change, so does our perception of our experience and mood. You can read more here.
  

• Electromagnetically: Measurable by electrocardiogram (ECG), the electricity produced by the heart is more powerful and far reaching than the brain’s. It can be measured at least 10 feet from the body!
  • Contrary to popular belief, the number of heartbeats per minute is less informative for health studies than heart rate variability (HRV). The length of time between each individual beat varies, and HRV measures those variations. The greater the differences, the more flexible and adaptable the heart is. A higher HRV = better heart health as well as greater physiological and emotional resilience. Read more here.
  • The HRV pattern is revealed in a waveform graph produced from the ECG. Research shows that greater HRV results in a smooth, fluid sine wave, and lower HRV is expressed as a jagged line with spikes and dips. These are respectively described in the scientific community as ‘coherent’ and ‘incoherent’ patterns.
    

Of the four methods of communication from the heart, HRV carries the energy of what we are feeling to the brain for interpretation and emotional storage. Perhaps it’s no surprise that a ‘coherent’ higher HRV sends messages of harmony and positivity, and an ‘incoherent’ low HRV reflects difficult, stressful emotions. This status has wide ranging effects, where, per Childre and Rozman, “coherent heart rhythms enhance the immune response, improve hormonal and nervous system balance, and alleviate pain.”

Vagus  Nerve

This is a cranial nerve that originates in the brain and then branches out through the body to touch the throat, the heart and lungs, all of the organs, and the intestinal tract. 80% of the communication through the vagus nerve is from the body - especially the heart - to the brain. It tells the hypothalamus what’s going on so that the brain can direct the right protective or healing response.

Coherence,  Cognition,  Clarity,  and  Capacity

Still yourself for a moment, and then place your hand on your heart. Sense your heartbeat. Feel your breath. What is your emotional state? Can you tell?

Emotion travels faster than thought, and the heart’s intuitive intelligence defines our thoughts, actions, and behaviors. HeartMath provides a guide to go deeper, find answers, and generate change.

• Greater HRV creates a more well regulated mood, clarity, perspective, possibility, and options. It shapes physical, emotional, and psychological resilience. This is the foundation of intuition and heart intelligence: coherence.
• Stress responses lead to disordered heart rhythms. Thoughts become disorganized, reason shuts down, difficult emotions prevail, and social connections fray: incoherence.

Imagine repeatedly encountering a difficult person at work. They put you on edge, and you get in such a bad mood. You get snippy and irritable. Or perhaps you’re a student who has trouble focusing, and it gets worse with the pressure of a paper or a midterm. Your grades suffer, which makes you depressed and anxious. Or maybe you’re someone who worries a lot - constantly fretting. You feel like you have to control everything, from other people to what you eat. All of these can be measured in low HRV.

HeartMath practices increase our HRV, which enhances our self-awareness, alters our thought processes, and regulates our emotions. It opens our Window of Tolerance so that we can address hard things with clarity and perspective. This doesn’t mean that we don’t feel the difficulty, but we respond thoughtfully rather than with a kneejerk reaction. We can find another way to communicate with the difficult person. We are able to focus and approach the paper or test with calm confidence. Reason and good choices become available so that worry is less compelling.

The  Stress  Factor  &  Stress  Habits

One guarantee of existence is that life is challenging! We usually have the same, repeating stress triggers, and we get in the habit of reacting the same ways every time. These are well practiced stress habits! Stress habits commonly show up as irritability, worry, anger, excessiveness, forgetfulness/brain fog, anxiety, depression, fatigue, sleep disturbances, aches and pains, and even illness such as colds and flu.

I’ll bet you can feel stress physically in your body: tension, headache, racing heart, shallow breathing, digestive upset, feeling sick…it feels lousy.

We can reshape our stress habits to be more healing and productive, though!

Thousands of times a second the body communicates sensations and messages through the vagus nerve to the hypothalamus. It directs information to the brain’s cortex (executive function, focus, decision-making), which then sends the now organized data to the amygdala and hippocampus (in the limbic system) for memory storage.

The amygdala chooses the tone of stored memories (experiences) based on messaging from the cortex and the heart combined with sensory input - sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. Fascinatingly, “…the cells in the core of the amygdala synchronize to the heartbeat.”

Not surprisingly, stress habits install a bypass straight to the amygdala. Imagine the core cells of the amygdala vibrating incoherently! Negative emotions, a closed mind, fear, anxiety, and worry inform the creation of memory and associate it with the sensory experiences that accompany it. Stress habits develop as protective mechanisms to the fear and uncertainty embedded in memory.

Stress  Response  -  Hormones  and  Mood

Incoherent HRV is related to the release of stress chemicals, adrenaline and cortisol. Persistent incoherence and the stress response support a downward trend of emotional dysregulation, a closed mindset, and a sense of impossibility. A coherent HRV triggers the release of positive mood chemicals, such as dopamine, DHEA, oxytocin, and BDNF. These lead to stress resilience and a beneficial upward spiral.

Illness

Stress habits are also significant contributors to preventable lifestyle diseases related to nutritional status, such as Type 2 Diabetes, cholesterol imbalances, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, mood disorders, emotional eating, sleep disorders, cancer, dementia, and more.

Community

Our bodies intertwine the function of three brains to define our quality of life:

• Gut brain = instinct
• Heart brain = intuition, emotional feelings, sensations.
• Head brain = thought, reason, analysis, interpretation; experience, emotional memory storage.
  

HeartMath practices synchronize the gut, heart, and brain into coherence. The heart is the body’s most powerful rhythmic oscillator. The rhythms of the other two brains are pulled into sync with its own.

Coherence makes us resilient in the face of others’ stress habit-born incoherence. Because the electromagnetic fields of our hearts reach so far into the environment around us, negative emotions and stress habits can be like an easily transmittable virus to others. Those with strong immune systems are better able to ward off illness. Well established coherence protects us from the ‘infection’ of others’ incoherence.

Better yet, research studies have demonstrated that our own HRV can be measured in the brain waves of those around us. Therefore, our emotional status literally changes the emotions of those near us. Have you ever entered a room and sensed the mood? That mood is emotional content as expressed by HRV in those folks. By establishing our own coherent HRV before encountering others, we can pass our resilience along to them.

The  Beat  Goes  On

HeartMath offers a concrete, accessible path to physical and mental health. A practice session can last as long as we choose, and benefits can be felt in as few as 1 to 3 minutes.

Benefits include:

• Effective for focus, attention, and emotional regulation, it measurably improves brain function and symptoms of ADHD.

• Mood disorders heal as it modulates the release of hormones and neurotransmitters, thereby reducing both the overstimulation of anxiety and the blockages and energy drain of depression.
• Physical health improves as biochemical pathways flow effectively, the immune system responds appropriately, sleep improves, stress hormones decrease, and digestion functions properly.
• Performance and relationships become enhanced as cognition, perception, clarity, insight, positive energy, and calm all come online.
• Coherence creates resilience in all realms and can even shift the hearts of others.
  

The journey to stress resilience is found in the flexibility and adaptability of the heart. It is key to overall wellbeing. As you celebrate and reflect this holiday season, become aware of your own heart’s wisdom. Together let’s build a world of healing, resilience, and connection!