Dr. Jay Wiles

it gives us insight into is it making those fine-tune adjustments and adaptations so let me back up now and explain heart rate variability from a definition perspective and the way i like to explain this to the heuristic of heart rate that most people understand so for instance chris you know if i were to look at your you know a wearable that you have on let's say with your whoop and i open up your phone and in your phone i see that your heart is beating at a rate of 60 beats per minute

So we take some really easy math here and we say, okay, so if your heart is beating at a rate of 60 beats per minute, that's one beat that's occurring every single second.

And so therefore we're approximating that across a 60 second window, your heart is beating once every single second, 60 beats per minute, easy math.

Is that actually what's going on?

And the answer is no.

The heart actually doesn't operate like a metronome.

When the heart starts to operate like a metronome, that's actually when we run into some struggle, when we run into trouble.

Because the thermostat is starting to adjust to say, there's a lot of chaos that's going on right now.

I need to kind of like hone in, back in, and regulate the system to kind of a consistent, constant beat.

Because I've got other things that I've got to attend to.

There's threat that's kind of within my environment.

So what we'd actually say is that no, the heart during that 60 minute or 60 second window that we were looking at wasn't just kind of holding a nice even beat.

Actually, it was going up and down and up and down.

And if you look at a heart rate of someone just kind of at rest at baseline right now,

it kind of looks a little bit chaotic.

Like it doesn't actually have a nice little sinusoidal pattern or rhythm.

It actually looks quite chaotic.

And that's because there are many processes that are occurring in that time that it's causing your heart rate to speed up and to slow down and to speed up and to slow down.

And so with that, across that, let's say, cycle of speeding up and slowing down, the time between successive heartbeats, which is what we're looking at with heart rate variability,

is shrinking kind of as we inhale.