What is HeartMath®?

HeartMath will help you to transform your stress into resilience, to achieve higher levels of performance and to live your life with more heart, health and happiness.

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HeartMath is a system of simple and powerful self-regulation techniques which are easy to learn and designed to be used “in the moment”, whatever the situation, meaning that you can bring your best self to your professional, social and personal lives.

And what makes HeartMath unique is that you can practise the techniques using our Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Coherence biofeedback app and sensor. Coherence Biofeedback gives you real-time insight into your emotional, mental and physical state. This increases your self-awareness and helps you to develop the ability to self-regulate emotions, thoughts and behaviours.

The Heart-Brain Connection

Most of us have been taught that the heart is constantly responding to “orders” sent by the brain in the form of neural signals. However, it is not commonly known that the heart actually sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. This information travels via the vagus nerve and also as a pulse wave, electromagnetically and hormonally. Moreover, these heart signals have a significant effect on brain function – influencing emotional processing as well as higher cognitive faculties such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving. In other words, not only does the heart respond to the brain, but the brain continuously responds to the heart. These effects of heart activity on brain function have been researched extensively and independently over the past 40 years and there is currently a great deal of interest in Heart Rate Variability as an influence on brain activity.

 

HeartMath research has demonstrated that different patterns of heart activity (which accompany different emotional states) have distinct effects on cognitive and emotional function. During stress and negative emotions, when the heart rhythm pattern is erratic and disordered, the corresponding pattern of neural signals traveling from the heart to the brain inhibits higher cognitive functions. This limits our ability to think clearly, remember, learn, reason, and make effective decisions. The heart’s input to the brain during stressful or negative emotions also has a profound effect on the brain’s emotional processes – actually serving to reinforce the emotional experience of stress.

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In contrast, the more ordered and stable the pattern of the heart’s input to the brain during positive emotional states has the opposite effect – it facilitates cognitive function and reinforces positive feelings and emotional stability.

This means that learning to generate increased heart rhythm Coherence, by regulating breathing and sustaining positive emotions, not only benefits the entire body, but also profoundly affects how we perceive, think, feel and perform.

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For more about Heart Math CLICK HERE