What is Heart Rate Variability and Why is it Important for Tracking Health, Recovery and Resilience? with Andrea Samadi
Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast episode #125 on Heart Rate Variability that I just heard as being “The Most Important Biomarker for Tracking Health, Recovery and Resilience”[i] to Optimize Our Results by Dr. David Rabin on Neurohacker[ii] The Collective Insights Podcast with Heather Sandison. ND. My name is Andrea Samadi, I’m a former educator who has been fascinated with understanding the science behind high performance strategies in schools, sports and the workplace for the past 20 years. If you have been listening to our podcast for some time, you will know that we’ve uncovered that if we want to improve our social and emotional skills, and experience success in our work and personal lives, it all begins with an understanding of our brain. If you are listening to this episode on iTunes, click here to see the images in the show notes. Our podcast took a turn towards the importance of health and well-being with the Top 5 Health and Alzheimer’s Prevention Strategies last September 2020 with our episode #87[iii] and we have put a serious focus on these health staples and their importance on cognitive performance, ever since. I want to thank you for listening, and for keeping us in the TOP 100 charts on iTunes in the USA (for How-To/Education Category), Great Britain, Sweden, Mexico, Hong Kong, and many other countries. We appreciate everyone who supports the podcast which helps us to continue to produce content that will help you to further increase productivity and results in schools, sports and the workplace. I’m always looking for ideas and strategies that we can all use to optimize our lives, especially these days, a year after COVID-19 shut down the world, changed the way many of conduct business, run our schools, communities and live our own personal lives. As the focus has taken a serious shift to health, with mental health at the forefront, and well-being in our schools and workplaces, I want to share the most important strategies that I come across and make them actionable for everyone to implement. This brings us to this week’s topic, understanding Heart Rate Variability. What is Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Why is it Considered the Most Important Biomarker[iv] --a measure that captures what’s going on in a cell at any given moment that can serve as an early warning system for your health. Unless you have been training with a forward-thinking coach, you’re an elite athlete, or someone who has taken a serious interest in measuring their performance, most of us have not heard of, or really understand what exactly heart rate variability means, or why Dr. Rabin, a board-certified psychiatrist and neuroscientist, would consider it to be “the most important biomarker for tracking health.” I started to hear about heart rate variability while interviewing and researching certain guests, starting with Dr. Daniel Stickler[v], who raised his arm in the interview and mentioned that he wore the Whoop[vi] device that tracks his performance, and then again with Kelly Roman[vii], the CEO and Co-founder of Fisher Wallace Laboratories, when we were talking about his wearable medical devices for anxiety, depression, stress management and sleep that were shown to improve heart rate variability. I wrote down the term, thinking, it’s got to be connected to heart rate somehow, and had plans of looking it up to see what exactly it was, so I could learn more about it. The problem was, when researching this term, I seemed to come across very high-level explanations. For those listening who are teachers, we know that when learning a new topic, it really does help to begin at the starting point and build from there. One morning, I came across a post on Instagram from Neurohacker Collective[viii] that caught my attention. I’ve shared the Instagram post in the show notes, where they highlighted one of their recent podcasts that explained the importance of heart rate variability. I i