There is a balance to everything, an equal and opposite reaction. When the temperature outside drops, animals hibernate, and the leaves change color. When a predator is removed from an ecosystem, the ecosystem’s animals are impacted. The balance is thrown off.
Even though you may not know it, there is an optimal state of balance for your body. When that balance is impacted, things go wrong.
Without knowing it, many of us live in perpetual imbalance. The reason for it is often long-term, deep stress, especially when we don’t take steps to alleviate it or address its effects on our minds and bodies.
Because of that, our systems work less effectively. Our hormonal system produces more (or fewer) hormones than we require, we often experience prolonged brain fog, and our nervous systems contribute to a constant on-edge feeling.
However, there are things that we can do to restore balance, improve our stress resilience, and help the body function properly. One of those methods is to induce a state of heart coherence.
What is Heart Coherence?
According to researchers who discovered it in the 1980s, heart coherence is a physiological state where the body’s systems align, including breathing, heart, and brain rhythms. In a state of heart coherence, there is an optimal alignment between your heart rate variability, breathing, and the rhythm of your heartbeat happening.
This synchronous state prompts our body to function more effectively, providing more energy to get creative in our personal lives and resist stress caused by the environment around us. This state also increases stress resilience by minimizing the body’s normal responses to stressors and the resulting effect on the body and brain.
More simply put – your body and brain are finally aligned and in perfect working order.
Heart Coherence Benefits Can Help Combat Stress
Your physical state impacts the effects of stress more than you know. If we don’t actively induce heart coherence – or participate in other research-based well-being activities – our systems remain unaligned and at reduced capacity. When our nervous system, specifically, exists in this state, it can make us hyper-sensitive and anxious, causing disproportionate emotional responses to a not so stressful events. In other words, stressors can trigger us. We then overreact and experience a dysregulated inappropriate emotional response.
When heart coherence is activated, our body can more effectively resist slipping into its fight or flight mode. Instead of a quick reaction, studies show that our brains can more easily come up with more innovative and effective solutions to problems, properly process and regulate our emotions, increase positive feelings, and prepare better for future challenges ahead.
While heart coherence can happen in your body on its own, there are things we can do to induce it. In fact, we should become more practiced at activating it. The more we intentionally practice, the more frequently we will experience spontaneous periods of coherence. Research shows physiological evidence of improvement in heart rhythm patterns or heart rate variability (HRV), a foundational marker for health and wellbeing.
Heart coherence is one of the primary focuses of our UpJoy course. It’s one of the essential self-directed tools in our toolbox — when we learn it, we can intentionally practice it to lead a less stressful, more joy-filled life.