HRV

A perfectly regular heartbeat is not a good thing.

Counterintuitive as it may sound, that regularity is quite a red flag.

Irregularity indicates how adaptable and resilient you are. How well your body is able to handle stress and recover.

This metric is called Heart Rate Variability (HRV).

HRV is the variation in time between each heartbeat, measured in milliseconds. It’s not about how fast your heart beats, but how consistently irregular those beats are.

It tells how responsive your autonomic nervous system is – specifically the balance between your sympathetic ("fight or flight") and parasympathetic ("rest and digest") branches.

The higher the HRV, the better it is for you.

HRV is impacted by all pillars of our lives - exercise, good food, especially anti-inflammatory foods, sleep, meditation and stress management, and even social connections.

In turn, HRV impacts cardiovascular health, testosterone and growth hormones, cognitive markers, and more. It also impacts longevity markers such as telomere length, and is an overall indicator of how the body is ageing.

To the extent that, if I had to summarise all health into one metric, it would be HRV.

It might feel that HRV has suddenly come into the limelight due to the prevalence of wearables and tracking. But HRV has been known and measured in labs for over 50 years.

Thanks to wearables, we can keep track of it in real-time.

Having said that, it is important to know that HRV is a reactive marker, not a causative one. Also, it is very responsive, and changes every day. Simple things like a bad night of sleep, dehydration, or an evening workout can impact it.

So it’s important to view it as a trend over time, and not specific data points.

PS: I can’t figure out why it fell to 102 last night, since nothing I can think of was out of place yesterday. But it doesn’t matter, as long as the weekly and fortnightly trend is in control.

As posted on Linkedin.