Dr. Jay Wiles

Now I know a good bit about your HRV, but let's just say I didn't know anything about your HRV.

And I looked at that data point.

What could I tell you about your stress response?

The answer is I could tell you basically nothing.

One singular reading outside of any context in regards to HRV isn't a signaling window to me telling you, I can see how, you know, on a spectrum, how stressed Chris is.

I can't gain that.

Now over time,

I can say HRV is showing me how well you adapt to stress, how flexible you are to stress, not how stressed you are, but how adaptable to stress you are.

There's nuance there.

So there's a difference between those two.

So I can't just take that absolute value in number and say, okay,

I'm at a 50 milliseconds this morning when I took my HRB reading.

And so therefore, I know that I am stressed.

And so when people try to tap into that as a, hey, I'm going to use that as the guide, it sets them up for disaster.

Because then we have this nasty, unwinding, self-fulfilling prophecy of people looking at these data points, and especially without context, just looking at singular data points, and then using that to drive decisions.

Because one reading of HRB

should never be used to drive decision-making.

Yeah.

I want to give credit where credit's due.

It's like these wearable companies, so fill in the blank, Whoop, or a Python, Apple, all these great wearable companies that are out there that people are leveraging.