Dr. Jay Wiles

So that time is going down, down, down, because heart rate is increasing.

And then as we exhale, it's going longer, longer, longer.

So the space between successive heartbeats is actually elongating.

Now the difference between those heartbeats, so when we look at what is the amount of time, and we look at that in milliseconds.

So

For instance, we wouldn't say like there's one second or 1.2 seconds in the world of heart rate variability research.

We would say there's 1,000 milliseconds or 980 milliseconds.

That variance tells us something about the fine-tunements that your nervous system is making to adjust to its environment.

And when it's having a really hard time adjusting, then we see that variance start to decrease.

So it may go from, hey, I'm in a really perfectly relaxed mode and my heart rate variability is 100 milliseconds to it may actually start to shrink pretty substantially when we're experiencing stress because our body's having a hard time adapting.

So it depends on the metric you're using.

This is actually kind of a misconception that people have with heart rate variability is they think that it's a singular metric when indeed it's not actually a singular metric.

It's a whole compilation of metrics.

So there's generally around 12 to 15 HRV metrics that people use.

I know.

It gets complicated.

We don't need to make it over complicated.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, and that variance that occurs between heartbeats, the reason that's so incredibly valuable and so important for people to understand is because as we examined whether or not your nervous system is truly adapting to its environment, we can take that number and plot it across time and see whether or not it is changing or is it staying the same or is it decreasing?