People who have a high HRV may have greater cardiovascular fitness and may be more resilient to stress. This suggests some interesting possibilities. If the system is in more relaxed state, the variation between beats may be higher. Based on data gathered from many people, if the system is in more of a fight-or-flight mode, the variation between subsequent heartbeats tends to be lower. HRV may offer a noninvasive way to signal imbalances in the autonomic nervous system. If you do wish to give it a try, chest strap monitors tend to provide a more accurate measure of HRV than wrist devices. The accuracy of these methods is still under scrutiny, but the technology is improving. But in recent years, companies have launched apps and wearable heart rate monitors that do something similar. The gold standard is to analyze a long strip of an electrocardiogram done in the doctor's office. However, if we have persistent instigators such as stress, poor sleep, unhealthy diet, dysfunctional relationships, isolation or solitude, and lack of exercise, this balance may be disrupted, and your fight-or-flight response can shift into overdrive. Our body handles all kinds of stimuli and life goes on. It responds not only to a poor night of sleep, or that sour interaction with your boss, but also to the exciting news that you got engaged, or to that delicious healthy meal you had for lunch. The ANS provides signals to the hypothalamus, which then instructs the rest of the body either to stimulate or to relax different functions. The brain is constantly processing information in a region called the hypothalamus. The ANS is subdivided into two large components: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the fight-or-flight mechanism and the relaxation response. It works behind the scenes, automatically regulating our heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and digestion among other key tasks. This variation is controlled by a primitive part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system (ANS). HRV is simply a measure of the variation in time between each heartbeat. Researchers have been exploring another data point called heart rate variability (HRV) as a possible marker of resilience and behavioral flexibility. In the comfort of our homes, we can check our weight, blood pressure, number of steps, calories, heart rate, and blood sugar. The gene itself doesn’t physically change-the expression of the gene changes, and that expression is what matters most because that is what affects our health and our lives.When it comes to your health, it is now easy to measure and track all kinds of information. So as we react to a situation in our external environment that produces an emotion, the resulting internal chemistry can signal our genes to either turn on (up-regulating, or producing an increased expression of the gene) or to turn off (down-regulating, or producing a decreased expression of the gene). What do I mean by the environment within our body? As I said previously, emotions are chemical feedback, the end products of experiences we have in our external environment. But we now know through the science of epigenetics that it’s not the gene that creates disease but the environment that programs our genes to create disease-and not just the external environment outside our body (cigarette smoke or pesticides, for example), but also the internal environment within our body: the environment outside our cells. So if many people in someone’s family died of heart disease, we assumed that their chances of also developing heart disease would be pretty high. “Making Genetic Changes We used to think that genes created disease and that we were at the mercy of our DNA. About 95 percent of who we are by midlife1 is a series of subconscious programs that have become automatic-driving a car, brushing our teeth, overeating when we’re stressed, worrying about our future, judging our friends, complaining about our lives, blaming our parents, not believing in ourselves, and insisting on being chronically unhappy, just to name a few.”īreaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One This means that we will think the same thoughts, feel the same feelings, react in identical ways, behave in the same manner, believe the same dogmas, and perceive reality the same ways. Those programs are running us, because the body has become the mind. This means that for those of us over 35, we have memorized a select set of behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, emotional reactions, habits, skills, associative memories, conditioned responses, and perceptions that are now subconsciously programmed within us. “Psychologists tell us that by the time we’re in our mid-30s, our identity or personality will be completely formed.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |