Podcast: E17 - HRV

Listen to the episode here: E17 - HRV - https://apple.co/4bqjeaf

Hey there, it's Dr. Tiffany. I want to welcome you to episode 17 of Integrative Mental Health Therapy with Dr. Tiffany. And with the last episode, we focused on shitting. We've been in the middle of a lot of cognitive distortions related to anxiety and the types of ways that people will talk to themselves that will activate from a cognitive kind of programming those neural they will activate stress, right?

So today in episode 17, we're gonna start to make this bridge from the cognitive distortions and focusing on anxiety, so I'm gonna bridge to shifting into more brain health conversations and specifically things that impact ADHD and focus. So as we go into the next month, there's gonna be a shift in the focus getting away from anxiety and today this this message is a bit of a bridge we're talking about here in episode 17 heart rate variability specifically heart math and this is something that is near and dear to my heart this is something I am personally quite involved in those of you who work with me understand that my perspective of this three-leg stool connection of brain body mind definitely includes heart rate variability.

So what is it? How does it tie to the psychological? Like how does it tie in to the physiological? And does it have anything to do with neurology? And it's one of the few measurements that sits kind of in the middle of all of that. And I think that's why I've fallen in love with it.

And I've shared many times that part of how I'm on this journey with you to help you heal is because I have a lot of personal investment as well and really needed this information when I started out on my health journey. And I really had to spend a lot of time piecing it together.

I was getting information from the heavyweights in the field, Neil Nathan, the author of the book Toxic and a member of ICI, which is an environmental illness organization. He was the president when I first joined. Dr. Datisse Karazian, I've spent three years working in clinical mentorship in his programs to become an advanced certified practitioner under him. He is the reason I pursued becoming a naturopath. I wanted the chance to work under him. And there were only a few ways to be able to do that. And then from there, you know, there've been a lot of other people that I have studied under the amen clinics again Have my heart forever. I've You know worked With them for years now and have opportunity to meet dr. Amen a couple of times and actually talk to him all of these people What would ultimately play into? the development of the Three Lake stool, many, many, many more that I can't even begin to mention, but HeartMath and HRV was something that just wasn't showing up.

And this is just one of these pieces that was randomly just not included in all of the work that I was doing over the years. And then with my own health journey of feeling like I just wasn't as resilient. I wasn't as stress resilient, you know? The diagnosis of lupus, and then ultimately diagnosis of fibromyalgia, there was a lot of brain fog, there was a lot of lack of muscle endurance, there was a lot, like a lack of overall brain energy, physical energy, just the output had crashed.

And for the longest time, right, I was just due to Dr. Kalish and other practitioners. There's a doctor who's behind the hormone cure, Godfreit. I was part of the believer of adrenal fatigue and adrenal health, and I still very much am a proponent of making sure your adrenals are healthy but it never was on our radar to look at heart rate variability.

And so I guess what I'm trying to tell you in this long-winded way is I have been able to train under some of the biggest and brightest in the field. And over all those years, it took biohacking and the likes of like Dave Asprey and the whoop and the aura ring to kind of close this gap of understanding how to assess HRV overnight and look at sleep quality and all of these things.

And when someone tells me that they're stressed or not stressed, being able to use heart rate variability to see what's going on with their autonomic nervous system, which is very much the nervous system, the neurological system, a brain-based system, right?

So there we are talking about the brain to see how they are responding to stress. Do they bend but not break like a fern, which is what the nervous system is supposed to do, or are they crashed, right? Or are they telling me that they're traumatized and that their nervous system feels like it's fight and fight, flight, freeze, well, fight and flight. And then I looked at their aurora ring and they're in parasympathetic.

So it started to become this thing because of the oar rings and the whoops where I can actually look into someone's nervous system functioning and say that anxiety that you think you're feeling, that's actually your nervous system crashed. You have no resilience left in your system, in your nervous system.

And guess what? People who have for their age, a low HRV are more prone to mental health issues, struggling with anxiety and depression specifically. They're more prone to having PTSD. They're more prone to autoimmune disorders and cardiovascular crises and just health related struggles and challenges and diagnoses.

And people who have a high HRV are much more likely to be able to recover from psychological diagnosis, are much more likely to overcome some sort of health crisis. It is an indicator for where people are on the health spectrum and where they can end up. It is a health indicator, all in your oar ring on your finger, all in your whoop on your wrist.

And people have no idea how big of a deal it is. And so HeartMath is, there's an institute called HeartMath who's been studying the impact of the heart to the brain connection for I think about 20 years now. And I'm a certified HeartMath practitioner.

And it's all about, and it's just so exciting. I'm just gonna have to take another episode to talk about it, but it's all about the training of heart to brain coherence and health, but also HRV improvement. Oh my gosh, let me say that again. HRV improvement.

So here's the challenge. How do you improve HRV? What is HRV, right? Heart rate variability is the beats between beats, right? So heartbeats, it is that variation in between the heartbeats. There is supposed to be a high amount of movement and variation in between each heartbeat.

And the higher that variability, the higher that up and down in between beats, the healthier you are. It is a cardiovascular marker. And it's a real one, it's an important one. And up until heart math, and then up until all of these wearables and all this tech, the only place they were assessing this was in a cardiovascular setting or with sports.

So what happens when you have high HRV? Not only do you have a lower incidence of psychological challenges, you have higher cognitive function, you have better management of ADHD and executive function

 challenges and symptoms, you have higher sports performance, you have a more resilient and resistant system to chronic stress and illness, it is a marker of wellness or unwellness. It's huge.

And it's one where you can track whether what I'm asking you to do is working, the functional medicine changes, the psychological work that I'm asking you to do, but even more importantly, when I ask you to do work, when I ask you to meditate, to do body scans, things of that nature, can you see a difference in your HRV?

When you tell me I'm getting high quality sleep, I get good sleep and I ask you to get a war ring and I get back information saying you're not getting deep restorative sleep, you're not getting good REM sleep, and your HRV is really compromised, and then I give you strategies like heart math to improve that.

It's a way for us to see if that's actually working. It's huge. So I'll sum up quickly what heart math is and then I'll probably take a little bit of time to talk about it in the next episode and try to not have these be too long. Heart math is a way for you to initiate the process of meditation and to train your nervous system from being in sympathetic dominance to parasympathetic and it's a way to see it in real time happening and then to train your system with meditative practices to improve over time and then see your overall resilience improve.

It's a technology, an institute full of research, but a technology to help change your brain and to change the way your heart talks to your brain and to strengthen the connection via the vagus nerve from heart to brain. Now I do other things to help with improving the vagus nerve, but this is a technique and tools and technology and ways of assessing to actually make sure, one, you're getting into a great meditative state that's changing your body, and two, to see are you able to impact influence your HRV which then means your psychological health, your physical health, your immune health.

And as somebody who uses heart math and trains and meditates daily, I can tell you this is a way to improve your HRV. It's a way for you to change the fitness of your HRV. I can help you combine this with this three-leg stool and become a healthier, more resilient person extending your life.

If that's not incredible, I don't know what is. Okay. And this bridges that gap between stress response and executive function and ADHD and starts to pull all these things together. So in the interim, I want you to look at like the aura ring, I get nothing out of this, there is no fancy code or anything.

And I want you to look at heart math and tell me what you think. You know, let me know if it's something you're already using. Are you already seeing these improvements that I'm talking about? When I come back and I do the next episode, I'm gonna include some images of the differences in brains that are coherent versus incoherent so that you can actually see the difference and talk a little bit more about the heart-math technology.

I'm so excited about this and have been practicing very religiously myself for probably eight months now and can see a massive difference in so many things. So anyway, okay, noodle on this. Until next time, remember it's brain, body, mind. Be well.