Measure Your Stress Levels With HRV

From Coach Lizzie

More and more people are wearing tracking devices now, including the Oura Ring, Whoop Strap, Apple Watch and Fitbit. These devices have come a long way with their technology, and are now able to measure something called HRV, which stands for Heart Rate Variability.

Myself and the other coaches of The One Percent Club will mainly use this to help gauge and measure our clients current stress levels, as this will have a huge impact on their health, which is something we are looking to improve whilst they are working with us. It also correlates and helps explain other things, such as sleep quality, nutritional choices, ability to recover and performance. So you can see its a very useful bit of information. But what is it exactly??

HRV is a measure of the variation in time between heartbeats and is controlled by your autonomic nervous system (ANS). More specifically it reveals the balance between your your parasympathetic (PNS) and sympathetic (SNS) nervous system.

The ANS is the part of the nervous system that regulates involuntary physiological processes including things such as heart rate, digestion and respiration, causing things to up or down regulate depending on the feedback the brain is receiving. It has the sympathetic division in charge of ramping thing up, also knows as the fight or flight response and the parasympathetic division which down regulates things towards relaxation, sometimes referred to the rest and digest system.

We should ideally be pretty good at regulating our nervous system, moving in and out of different responses from the events and stimuli life throws at us day to day. However, if someone is consistently heavily stressed, having poor sleep, a poor diet, minimal exercise etc, they can find themselves stuck in a fight or flight response. This would then show up with a poor HRV reading, as your ANS balance (or lack of) will directly impact your hearts activity and therefore effect the reading.

So you can see how it can be an incredibly useful bit of data to have and a great way to check in with your current stress levels. This is something that we have found many people actually find hard to do until it becomes a problem, often because they have spent the majority of their life in a highly stressed state and so to them, being stressed feels normal! This is reflected in the fact that in the UK last year, 74% of the population felt stress to the extent that they were unable to cope or completely overwhelmed. This obviously has a significant negative impacts on health, both physical and mental, which we will cover in next weeks article.

Unlike other health metrics, and against what people might expect, we want our HRV to be high. Our heart should not actually beat like a steady drum or metronome but in fact change rhythm with each beat and have high levels of variation!

High levels are associated with good fitness, someone who is well recovered, well rested with a dominant PNS.

Low levels on the other hand are associated with stress, poor health, being undercovered, overtraining and a dominant SNS.

So what levels are we aiming for?

There is a lot of individuality with HRV, with things such as genetics and age having an impact. So defining a normal range is difficult. To give you an idea though, Whoop (the fitness tracker strap) have been collecting data from all their users and come up with these averages;

50% of 20-25 year olds fall between 55-105

50% of 60-65 tear olds fall between 25-45

The average for all male users is 65

The average for all female users is 62

Oura ring published these findings which are similar in terms of showing the decline in HRV with age and males being slightly higher than females.

It’s important to keep in mind that most people who have bought a Whoop Strap or Oura Ring are probably into their health and fitness which means the data is probably from a fairly healthy and health conscious population.

But because of its individual nature, a good approach is to start to track it and establish your own baseline, trends and levels. You will then be able to see what’s high for you and what’s low and link this to other facts such as your resting heart rate and sleep. If you see your HRV heading down and you then notice your performance and sleep quality is doing the same it would be a pretty safe bet that stress and recovery are not where they should be. Equally if you notice yours sleep scores are high and you’re hitting PBs, this will probably line up with a higher HRV score for you.

If I use myself as an example, in November I left a job, moved cities and started a new company. For someone who struggles with change anyway you can see on this graph what that did to my HRV levels in December, dropping day by day. As my HRV was plummeting I can tell you that I was waking up feeling tired, had a constant head fog, had poor energy in the gym, and was a lot more emotional than normal!!

The positive thing however, is that because I was tracking this, how I was feeling made sense and it was a clear sign that I needed to put some better coping mechanism in place to help deal with he higher levels of stress that my body was under.

So what can we do to help increase our levels?

If you start to track and you can see that your levels are consistently declining, this is your bodies way of telling you that your stress load is too high. You therefore need to decrease the fight or flight based SNS and ramp up the rest and digest based PNS. Essentially, start to use some stress management techniques that will then lead to improved HRV readings. And the great thing is, you’ve got data to show you if and when they start to work!

Here are 9 things within your control you can do to increase your HRV.

1. Practice breathing and mediation

2.Perfoming regular physical activity (although note that intense exercise will temporarily lower your HRV)

3.Reduce your caffeine intake as it will ramp up your SNS

4.Increase your sleep hygiene and quality

5.Stay hydrated and eat a balanced diet

6.Keep tracking your HRV and using your data to help focus your behaviour and work out your patterns.

7.Consider taking Ashwagandga, a supplement made from an Indian root. Known as an adaptogen, it is thought to help the body cope with stress.

8.Make sure you aren’t overtraining by giving yourself adequate recovery time

9.Minimise or reduce alcohol as its has been reported to temporarily reduce your levels.

Hopefully this article has given you a better understanding about what HRV is and how it can be a great tool to help show you (amongst other things) the levels of stress your mind and body are under, as well as having some tools to help improve it.

And of course, myself and the team hope it helps you head towards feeling, moving and looking your best.

Have a great week,

Lizzie and The One Percent Team