How can we understand the health impact of a stressful day followed by a fast food dinner?  Perhaps a better question would be, how can we understand the significance of a good night sleep followed by a healthy breakfast? Measuring your heart rate variability can provide an interesting marker and clearly demonstrate the benefits of your healthy lifestyle choices.  

 

A heart rate variability monitor measures the subtle changes between your heart beats.  A healthy person has a great deal of “variability” between beats and the specific changes can indicate how much of your body is being regulated by the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system versus the parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system.  Quality equipment is even able to measure how much of your system is being regulated by neurohormones (hormones that directly affect the nervous system) like cortisol or serotonin.

 

One of the challenges with measuring HRV is being able to interpret the data. Heart Rate Variability has been studied for decades and can be very reliable with high grade equipment however the data must be easy to decypher or it becomes useless.  At The Cleansing Tree we are able to provide our clients with a detailed report demonstrating their results in pie charts and bar graphs making the information accessible, easy to read and help you track your progress.

 

Sometimes our health efforts come with such subtle changes that we may fail to recognize any benefit and revert to our old habits.  This is where HRV can motivate by making us more aware of how our body is responding to both positive and negative factors. Get your baseline HRV today and enjoy “seeing” your health improve.