Transforming Stress into Strength: New Study on Stress & HRV

Managing stress is crucial for improving heart health, and studies show it can significantly enhance heart rate variability (HRV), a key indicator of cardiovascular health. By using stress management techniques, individuals can tackle both immediate and long-term challenges related to heart conditions.

• Introduction to the connection between stress and heart health 
• Definition and importance of heart rate variability (HRV) 
• Evidence linking stress, psychological distress, and cardiovascular risks 
• Overview of effective stress management techniques 
• Discussion on personal mental responses to stressors 
• The significance of addressing underlying causes of stress 
• Summary of findings from the 2024 meta-analysis on stress interventions 
• Final thoughts on the role of stress management in achieving long-term heart health

Disclaimer:

This podcast is for general informational purposes only. It should not be used to self-diagnose, and it is not a substitute for a medical exam, cure, treatment, diagnosis, prescription, or recommendation. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Chapters

• 0:00 Improving Heart Health Through Stress Management
• 11:12 Understanding the Root of Stress
• 17:09 Enhancing Heart Health With Stress Management

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Innate Ability and Health Podcast. My name is Ryan, I'm your host and today we're going to be talking about stress and heart rate variability, specifically how stress management can actually improve heart rate variability. So, as many of you may know if you've heard some of my recent podcast episodes I'm working with Natural Heart Doctor to help patients improve their results by managing stress, by managing the mental aspect of what goes on regarding heart health. So this is a really interesting topic that I wanted to cover. It's been gone over extensively in a study that was done and the study was just done in 2024, and it was a meta-analysis, so a lot of different information went into checking this out and it was put out by the Journal of Behavioral Medicine and it's called Effects of Stress Management Interventions on Heart Rate Variability in Adults with Cardiovascular Disease medicine and it's called effects of stress management interventions on heart rate variability in adults with cardiovascular disease. So, as you can see, it's pretty much right on the money for what we want to learn about and be able to help when assisting people with heart health and everything that goes into how stress relates to that. So, first of all, let's take a look at what is heart rate variability.

Speaker 1: 1:31

Heart rate variability is a key indicator of overall heart health and what it's measuring basically is the variation of heartbeats, the intervals between them. Specifically, and just to give you a really good quote on this that explains it a bit, this is from Harvard Health Publishing a highly variable heartbeat means that interval between beats fluctuate, although only by a fraction of a second. High HRV seems to signal a healthy heart because it reflects the heart's ability to respond quickly to rapid changes occurring throughout the body. Now, obviously, we all know, if we're in the alternative health or holistic health field, that balance is everything in the body and when your body is going through different processes whether it's digestion, exercising, experiencing different stresses from toxins in the environment or stress, or whenever it is a lot of things change Hormones go up and down, different levels of exertion change your electrolyte balance, et. Etc. Your heart has to respond and be able to handle all of these things and heart rate variability measures the ability of your heart to respond during those times and to help you stay healthy and have the energy you need and everything else that goes along with a healthy heart. Now that we've got heart rate variability down.

Speaker 1: 3:04

What does it have to do with stress and how does stress management influence it? And this is really really critical to understand specifically. Most people think of handling stress as an acute thing where you are maybe de-stressing from some moment that has caused you to be stressed, to have some level of emotional distress or something going on in your life that causes that stress. By regulating that down, you're able to maybe not go into AFib or to not have as hard a reaction on your blood sugar or your hypertension level or whatever it is right. All of these things affect heart health, so that's how stress is usually addressed and thought of, even in the holistic world. However, what was found in this study was that it goes beyond that. Stress management actually helps improve longer term the results of your HRV. So improve your HRV.

Speaker 1: 4:10

I'm going to read directly from the study here so that you can see what I'm talking about. It says here, right in the introduction cardiovascular disease affects over 120 million adults in the US and significantly reduces disability-free adjusted years. So people get worse as they get older or just in general. Right. And then later on it says here, next paragraph psychological distress, depression, anxiety and stress in general increases cardiovascular risks in individuals with and without established cardiovascular disease. So we know that, and this study showed that stress period causes a worse result for people who have cardiovascular disease or who don't. Right Psychological distress elicits physiological responses, including sympathetic activation. So the fight or flight activation right, which have been implicated as possible mechanisms linking psychological distress and cardiovascular risk? Okay, this is the basis of what they were looking at in the study and what they found in their summarizing here.

Speaker 1: 5:29

Heart rate variability, hrv, is a non-invasive measure of the autonomic nervous system. Although the association between various HRV components are complex, the predominant view is that high, vagal, mediated HRV reflects the ability of the cardiovascular heart rate variability basically is more able to deal with physical or psychological stress. So it's really important to understand how this relates to each other and when you know that when you're working on heart rate variability and when you're working on stress improving both they go hand in hand you can handle a lot of things all at once. Okay, so let's take a look at this. If we can work on improving your heart rate variability by doing stress management and helping you understand how stress works, we're not just handling the immediate AFib attack or increase in blood pressure, we're handling your long-term heart health. So you're going to tick off a lot of boxes here by just working on stress management and stress management is a pretty broad and wide open field, and they used a lot of different techniques in this study.

Speaker 1: 6:59

You could be doing things that help you stay calmer in stressful situations or put you in a state that is less stressed after you've experienced stress. Either one of these things would be valid stress management techniques, and learning how to do them in the moment is also very important. There's different ways of going about this. One is you have day-to-day activities you do day in and day out, that help you learn how to handle stress, and it just put you in a state of mind where you're not in the fight or flight mode. You're in that rest and repair mode. You're not in the fight or flight mode. You're in that rest and repair mode. Parasympathetic system allows you to get into a state where you're healing right and those things like daily yoga activities, going for walks, doing things that you enjoy, meditation, for those that find that effective and helpful, and also different physical activities that are strictly dealing with a body, like stimulating the vagus nerve through different essential oils using different tools that help do the same thing. All of these things are valid and should be done. Also, just training yourself in life, in the moment, to react more appropriately or in a way that you feel is appropriate to stress, is important.

Speaker 1: 8:17

I always say stress is how you respond in life, because I've seen by working with people over the years that many times there is one person who is in what appears to be a very stressful situation and they're completely freaked out by something and their blood pressure goes out the roof, their heart's racing, they're definitely in fight or flight mode. And then another person they maybe appear to be not in a stressful situation who has the same reaction, and you wonder why one person reacts one way in one situation. One person reacts another way. The person in a very high stress situation may not react at all, or they may, and it's how they respond to the stressful situation that determines the level of stress in their life. Hopefully that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 9:02

So what this research found was that stress management interventions, techniques to help with stress, like just being mindful in the moment, being aware of your response and doing something to alleviate that stressful response on a physical level, whether it's going for a walk, getting away from the situation or putting something essential oils or something on your body that helped, or whatever it was for that person also improved their heart rate variability, and remember this was done specifically on people who had cardiovascular disease. So this, really, if you're experiencing something like AFib or you're experiencing a high blood pressure or anything else related to heart health, then this information was tested and found to be applicable to people who are in your situation. So working on your stress management is very, very important, and I just bring that up because it's not always given the same level of importance as taking a supplement daily or making sure you exercise, and the truth is they all need to be there. You can't really omit one and expect to get the results that you want to get. Okay, great.

Speaker 1: 10:10

Now I wanted to also bring up my take on this and how I look at this. I wanted to also bring up my take on this and how I look at this because it's a little different than even the alternative holistic viewpoint that a lot of people who are listening to this probably already have, which is that stress management is needed and something should be done about it. You should be doing things like yoga, tai Chi, breath work, whatever it is to help yourself, either in the moment with stress or as a practice that you do that helps you become more stress resilient. These are all great, but still mostly physical level things. Breath work you're doing something with your body right. Yoga you're doing something with your body right. Tai Chi something with your body. Now. These things have been shown through various other studies and this study that they improve stress management. And in this study it was also found that heart rate variability improved, which is great for long-term heart health. And all of these things have been found. These stress relief mechanisms have been found to stimulate that parasympathetic nervous system, get you into that healing state right.

Speaker 1: 11:12

However, what is sometimes not thought of and not looked at is that there's a reason some people get stressed by certain stressors in their life and others don't, and you have to find the mental reason behind that in order to truly handle why that person has a non-optimal physical reaction to stress. Otherwise, it's kind of like not that it's exactly the same, but it's like taking an aspirin for a headache. Obviously, yoga has a lot of other therapeutic values. Has this Tai Chi and breath work, and I'm not equating them to taking a drug, but it's like taking an aspirin for a headache. Obviously, yoga has a lot of other therapeutic values, as does Tai Chi and breathwork, and I'm not equating them to taking a drug at all. But I'm just saying on a mental level, these physical activities are not handling what's going on with that person mentally, and that's why I work as a mindset coach, that's why I work at digging underneath there.

Speaker 1: 12:00

Why does this trigger that person? What has happened in their life that they need to look at and readjust their thinking on or get rid of the emotional, negative energy, trauma, whatever you want to call it that is associated with these things, and then that stress won't stress them out anymore. It won't cause that reaction on a physical level. So I want to make that very clear. A person is stressed out by, let's say, traffic. They can't deal with traffic. They always have road rage right and their handling has been to do breath work while they're driving or to do yoga every morning, because they have to drive every morning as part of their job and that helps them not be as stressed out by traffic. But every time they do go into traffic, no matter how much they do these different things, they still have elevated heartbeat, or maybe they get AFib even, or their blood pressure goes up or whatever it is that occurs for them when they're under this type of stress is happening. It is that occurs for them when they're under this type of stress is happening and, yes, it can be mitigated by doing breathwork when it comes up or by saying a mantra stay calm, it's not bad, or whatever it is that they say, or all these things.

Speaker 1: 13:14

But there's another step you could do that's even deeper than that, and that's find out what has happened in that person's life. What are the mental computations that are going on that cause them to feel stressed about traffic, which then results in those physical changes that then occur and stress out their heart or cause different, irregular heartbeats or whatever it is. So you have to dig deeper. Just having mitigation techniques and things you do that kind of make it not so bad isn't the whole answer. It definitely could be part of it.

Speaker 1: 13:48

But one of the reasons the person has stuck stress, so to speak, stress that always causes them an issue is because they haven't gone and found out what's underneath that stress. It would to make an analogy on a physical level, it would be like a person has some sort of toxic load, like maybe they have a lot of mold in their body or they're exposed to mold all the time and they're experiencing the negative effects of mycotoxins and all those things that that occurs with that Brain fog, definitely, heart issues could be a part of it, gut trouble, all of these things. Low energy can occur and just saying we're going to give you extra coffee in the morning because we know you get low energy and we're going to beef up your B vitamins so that you have more digestive power, but we're not going to worry about getting rid of the mold that's in your house or that's grown in your body and is affecting you negatively. We're not going to worry about all the mycotoxins you're exposed to. She's going to keep doing these things to mitigate it and make you more comfortable or more able to handle the fact that you have toxic mold. So that's the same type of concept with stress. Yes, we can do all these things that help stress along and keep you going and make you less effective at it, but what we really want to do is dig in and find the underlying reason that that causes you to feel stressed. And when you do that, then your heart rate variability and a lot of other things will improve tremendously because you have handled stress, you've handled the negative emotions related to it and you've handled all these different things.

Speaker 1: 15:24

Realize, this study was just done on mitigation techniques. It was just done on doing things that made the person feel a little better. Imagine if you actually got to the root of why a person was stressed. Why you might be stressed because of financial situations, why you might be stressed because of what's going on with your body and inability to heal something else. That might be stressed because of what's going on with your body and inability to heal something else that might be happening in your life that stresses you out. Instead of just having things that kind of make it feel a little better or help you through, we actually get rid of it so that when you do these other things that isn't to say you would then stop doing yoga or you'd stop meditating or you'd stop doing the things that make you feel better. You could still do those, but you get exponentially more benefit from doing them if you've actually really handled the underlying cause for stress.

Speaker 1: 16:11

So that is my take on this study is that, yes, mitigate it and improve your heart rate variability. This is something everybody should be doing, but really you should work with somebody who can actually dig in and find out the underlying reason that that stress is there and then imagine the exponential results when you continue to do things that mitigate stress, because life is going to continue to happen. People say, okay, stress is going to happen. That is true, but it puts you into a little bit of a victim mode. I'm always going to be the effect of stress, because stress is just part of life. Yes, it is, but you don't always have to be the effect of. It is actually what you should be learning and figuring out. You can use stress to improve your life, believe it or not, but that may be something that is a little down the road for a lot of us, but it's definitely real if you know how to approach that and what to do.

Speaker 1: 17:09

In summary, handling stress and mitigating stress and doing stress intervention techniques improves heart rate variability in people who have cardiovascular disease period. That's what the study found. Now I want to take it a bit deeper and find out why a person has stress in the first place and use mitigation techniques so you get even more improvement on hurry variability and all the other things that are improved, as we know, by having less stress and having more positive energy and emotions in your life and available for you to use, for you to use. So if you have any questions, always feel free to reach out to me on social media, ryan Mark Kimball, anytime, and I'd be happy to answer them, and you can always reach out to me at my email, which will be in the show notes as well, or just keep listening and learning and using this the best you can in your life, and I hope this was very helpful for you today. Thank you, have a great rest of your day.