Heart Rate Variability. Making the Invisible Visible

Your wearable has been tracking something for months that you've never looked at closely. And it may be the most honest thing your body has ever told you.

Heart rate variability — HRV — isn't your heart rate. It's the variation between beats. And that distinction reveals something your stress levels, your sleep score, and your symptoms can only hint at: whether your nervous system is actually recovering.

In Part 2 of the Neurowellness Series, we go deeper into what HRV is, what it really measures, and why it changes everything you understand about exhaustion, burnout, and recovery.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• What HRV actually is — and why it's not the same as your heart rate
• Why your nervous system can be stuck in fight-or-flight even when life looks fine from the outside
• Three real patient stories — and what their HRV data revealed that symptoms alone couldn't
• How to start measuring your own HRV, from consumer wearables to clinical-grade tools
• What actually moves the needle — and why your baseline isn't fixed

If you've ever felt like the data you're collecting isn't telling you the full story, this episode fills in the missing piece.

"Your nervous system's flexibility isn't measured in standard bloodwork. It's measured in HRV. And it's trainable." — Sheri

RELATED EPISODES

From the Stress & Nervous System theme:

• Episode 52: "Did You Know There is a Connection Between Breath and Chronic Diseases?"
• Episode 70: "Did You Know? | Stress Relief Hacks for Your Busy Life."
• Episode 77: "Stress, Your Nervous System, and Acupuncture – Why Just One Session Makes a Difference"

NEXT IN THE NEUROWELLNESS SERIES

Episode 3: "How Acupuncture + Herbs Work as Nervous System Medicine"
Discover the clinical mechanisms behind acupuncture and the vagus nerve, why herbal support matters, and what to expect when working with these tools for nervous system regulation.

TOOLS & PROGRAMS MENTIONED

HeartMath Institute
Real-time HRV biofeedback and coherence training
https://www.heartmath.com/

The Coherence Protocol
Sheri's 12-week structured nervous system regulation program (includes HRV baseline, biofeedback training, trend monitoring)
Element 5 Acupuncture + Wellness
https://element5wellness.com/coherence-protocol

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Transcript

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Welcome And Neurowellness Recap

Sheri 0:19

Welcome to the Wellness Inspired Podcast, a place where you can find inspiration, motivation, and empowerment in the pursuit of a wellness lifestyle. I'm your host, Sherry Davidson. I'm a wellness coach, acupuncturist, trailrunner, and former interior designer in Houston, Texas, and I am deeply passionate about health and well-being. And as always, I'm here with my co-host Finn. If you're new to the podcast, Vin is my Terrier Mix rescue dog, trailrunner, and loyal companion. He is also a therapy dog and greeter at Element 5 Acupuncture and Wellness. And today's exciting because this is part two of the Neuro Wellness series. If you haven't listened to part one yet, I'd encourage you to go back and start there because it lays the foundation for everything we're talking about in this series. That episode is called Why Don't You Feel Like Yourself? The Nervous System and Everything Else. And you can find it wherever you're listening right now. But if this is your first time here, welcome. So here's a quick version. Neurowellness is about nervous system regulation. It is the emerging wellness category that addresses something conventional medicine largely can't reach. The young professional who's exhausted and burning out despite doing everything right, and whose labs come back completely normal. The woman navigating perimenopause, whose hormones and nervous system are colliding in ways no single specialist is addressing. And the person who hit the wall after years of chronic stress and can't seem to find their way back. All three are dealing with the same underlying issue, a nervous system stuck in survival mode. And that's what the series is about. In episode one, we spent time on what dysregulation actually feels like: fragmented, reactive, exhausted in ways rest doesn't fix, and why it's so often invisible to conventional medicine. We talked about the two branches of the autonomic nervous system, the accelerator and the break, and why modern life keeps the accelerator stuck. Also, I mentioned heart rate variability, HRV. Briefly, as a teaser, I said it's the window into your autonomic nervous system's flexibility and that athletes use it to track recovery. Today we go deeper because HRV isn't just a number athletes track. It is the clearest window we have into what your nervous system is actually doing. And once you understand it, you'll look at your stress, your sleep, and your recovery completely differently. All right, you ready? Let's let's get into it.

What Heart Rate Variability Means

Sheri 3:04

So what is HRV? HRV is heart rate variability. It is the variation in time between consecutive heartbeats. Not your heart rate itself, not how fast your heart is beating, the gaps between each beat. And here's what most people don't know. If your heart beats, let's say 60 times a minute, those beats are not evenly spaced one second apart. A healthy heart actually beats at slightly irregular intervals. So maybe 0.95 seconds between one beat and the next, and then 1.04 seconds, then 0.98. That variation, those tiny differences in timing, that's your HRV. More variation equals higher HRV. And higher HRV means your nervous system is flexible, responsive, and regulated. Less variation equals lower HRV. And lower HRV means your nervous system is stuck, mostly in sympathetic overdrive, which is your fight or flight mode. And this happens even when there's nothing to fight, even when you're trying to sleep. And I want to say that again because it matters. Your nervous system can be in fight or flight mode even when you're lying in bed. Even when life is fine by every external measure. HRV can show that. Your symptoms might hint at it, but your HRV, it makes it visible. So let's talk about what HRV is actually measuring. In episode one, I used the accelerator and break analogy: sympathetic and parasympathetic. A well-regulated nervous system moves fluidly between them. Activation when you need it, recovery when you can. If you haven't heard that episode, I really encourage you to go back. It's the foundation for everything in this series. I know I said that before, but I just want to mention it again. But HRV sits right at that intersection. It's the fingerprint of how well your two systems are communicating. Again, high HRV, fluid, flexible, regulated. The nervous system can shift gears. Low HRV, it's stuck, mostly sympathetic. And that means your recovery is compromised. And this is where it starts to have negative impact on your health. I also introduced the term vagal tone in episode one. That's the activity level of your vagus nerve, the primary pathway of your parasympathetic system running from your brainstem through your heart, lungs, and gut. When the vagal tone is strong, your parasympathetic brake actually works. When it's weak, the accelerator dominates even at rest. So HRV is how we measure vagal tone objectively, which means HRV isn't just a wellness metric, it's a direct window into whether your nervous system's recovery capacity is actually functioning or just theoretically intact.

HRV, Vagal Tone, And Research

Sheri 6:04

And this is not a wellness fad. HRV has 40 years of clinical research behind it. It's used in cardiac rehabilitation, elite athletic performance, trauma recovery, and increasingly in preventative medicine. And that's where we sit. Now the fact that you can now access it on your wrist with a consumer device is relatively new and genuinely very useful.

Three Real-World HRV Patterns

Sheri 6:30

Okay, so now I want to bring this out of the abstract into something brilliant. So I want to talk about three people, three very different stories. In the last episode, I described three patients, all dysregulated, all missed by conventional medicine. So now I want to tell you what their HRV data looks like. The first is a high-performing professional in her early 30s. She looks fine on paper, she exercises regularly, has normal blood work, and occasionally meditates. But when you look at her HRV trend over eight weeks, it's moving in one direction. It's moving down. Her morning scores are chronically low, which tells us her nervous system isn't recovering overnight. What the data shows is what she can't fully feel yet. She is depleting faster than she's restoring every single week. Okay, the second patient is in perimenopause, late 40s, and her HRV is erratic. Some nights it's relatively good, most nights it's low. There's really no predictable pattern. So this maps directly to what's happening hormonally. Estrogen actually supports vagal tone. It's one of the mechanisms through which hormone fluctuations affect how you feel. As estrogen levels shift, so does HRV. The data makes visible what labs can only partially explain. There are so many women that come into my clinic and they don't understand the stress that they're feeling. They're holding a lot of tension in their jaws and their upper shoulders, and um they they just don't understand what's going on. And when you go through the changes, um your baseline, once that estrogen starts to drop, your baseline cortisol levels go up. And that's why many women who are perimenopause, menopause, um, they feel more stress, but they don't, they don't understand. And they'll come into my clinic and just say something feels off. I don't know what it is, but something's not right. Okay, let's move on to the third patient. Um, the third patient is what I call system collapse. Mid-50s, decades of chronic stress, just pushing through everything. Her baseline HRV is chronically low and barely changes. The gap between her stress state and her recovered state has narrowed to almost nothing. Her nervous system has lost flexibility completely. And that kind of recovery requires more than rest. It requires consistent, structured support over time. That didn't happen overnight. This is a very different case than a young professional who just can't fully feel what the data shows, right? This is someone who has been in that state for decades, and all kinds of signs and symptoms start showing up at this point. So there you have it. Three different people, three different patterns, three different clinical pictures. HRV helps distinguish them, and that distinction changes what we do clinically, and that matters.

Best Ways To Measure HRV

Sheri 9:40

Okay, so practical question here. How do you actually measure this? Well, you have several options at different levels of precision and cost. So the most common are consumer wearable. So it's the aura ring, whoop watch, or I'm sorry, the whoop band, Apple Watch, any kind of Garmin, chorus devices, those are all running watches. Um, all measure HRV overnight during sleep. And it does it at night because it's when the signal is the clearest, right? There's not all the noise happening during the day. So it's always measured at night. So they give you the trend and the data over time, which is more valuable than a single reading. And I'll tell you more about that in a second. But if you already own one of these devices, you probably have HRV data right now that you haven't looked at closely. Now, if you want something that is more accurate, um, the chest chest strap monitor, there is the Polar H10 paired with the HRV for training app. Um, this gets you research grade accuracy for morning readings and real-time data. So, this is what many clinicians and um I say serious athletes use. Um, so if you've ever seen a runner and they have that chest strap, that's that's what that's what they're measuring. That's what this is. And then there are dedicated biofeedback devices like the Heart Math Interbalance. It is the one I use with my patients in the coherence protocol. They don't just track HRV, they train you to shift, to shift it in real time through paced breathing. So I really um, I really like this little little device. It's fun. You can actually watch what's happening in real time. So you can watch your nervous system move from stress to calm on a screen. And that feedback loop is super powerful. So I really, really like this little little gadget. Okay, a few things worth knowing before you start tracking if that's something that you want to do.

How To Read Your HRV Trend

Sheri 11:41

So, first, your HRV number is the most meaningful compared to your own baseline, not someone else's. It's very individualized. It depends on age, sex, fitness level, and genetics. It all influences where your number sits. So you have to do, you know, a week, a month, get your baseline, and then you can kind of monitor and see if you're going up or down. So don't compare your yourself to someone else's chart on the internet, okay? Um, compare yourself to yourself over time. Okay, second, a single reading tells you less than a trend. So what matters is the direction. Is your HRV improving over weeks, declining, staying flat despite your efforts? That's the information that you're you're looking for, okay? And then third, HRV drops acutely with alcohol, poor sleep, illness, and high stress week. So just remember that. Those uh dips are informative, they're not alarming, okay, guys. I've had people come into my clinic and they were just freaking out because their HRV had dropped and you know they were going through a really stressful time. So it will go back up. If you have a healthy system, you should be able to get that back up pretty quickly. So the system is just trying to tell you something. So just pay attention. And fourth, this is the most important thing I'll say about HRV, it can be trained. That's what you need to remember. Your baseline is not fixed, and that's the whole point. Okay.

Proven Ways To Raise HRV

Sheri 13:11

So if it can be trained, then what actually moves HRV, right? What builds that vagal tone over time? Well, one of the number one ways to do that is paced breathing. It's probably the most direct and accessible tool we have. And here's why it works: your vagus nerve, the primary highway of your parasympathetic system, actually passes through your diaphragm on your way to your abdomen. When you breathe slowly and deeply from the diaphragm, that movement mechanically stimulates the vagus nerve. And the exhale specifically is where the parasympathetic activation happens. Your heart rate slows, vagal tone increases, the break engages. Slowing your breath to roughly four to six breaths per minute amplifies this effect. Five to ten minutes of this moves HRV measurably. And you don't need a device, but having that biofeedback makes it faster to learn. And that's what we do in the coherence uh protocol. So the second tool, and I'll go deep into this in part three, is acupuncture. It works through a very similar pathway. You know, we've been treating the nervous system for thousands of years. But in more modern times, as we are in today, acupuncture has documented neurophysiological mechanisms for activating the vagus nerve and modulating the HPA axis. That's the hypothalmic pituitary adrenal axis, your central stress response system. And multiple studies show measurable HRV improvements following regular treatments. That's not a coincidence. It's the same system being addressed through a different entry point. Okay, now there's zone two cardio, that sustained conversational paced aerobic exercise. This builds cardiac fitness and increases your baseline HRV over time. Nothing fancy, walking, easy cycling, or swimming. Okay. Okay, another thing that you can do to improve your HRV is consistent sleep timing, right? So irregular sleep disrupts something called your circadium autonomic coupling. Basically, the coordination between your body's clock and the nervous system. Regularity restores it. So going to bed and waking at consistent times is one of the most underrated nervous system interventions there is. Okay. And lastly but not least are aptogenic and nervine herbs. So that's ashwagonda, rhodiola, raishi, and passion flower. Um, they all have solid research behind their effects on cortisol regulation and autonomic balance. So we'll cover this in more detail in part three as well when I talk about uh Chinese medicine and acupuncture for regulating the nervous system. Okay, so there are some ways that you can start today to start uh increasing your HRV, and none of these require a device. Um, but the devices are fun because it does show you which one of these are working the best for you and how much. That feedback changes behavior. People do the work when they can see it's working, and that's not a small thing.

Biofeedback And The Coherence Protocol

Sheri 16:28

Okay, so before we wrap it up here, I I just want to talk a little bit about the coherence program that I have developed and the connection. So when I designed the coherence protocol, HRV tracking was a non-negotiable for me. Not because tracking is the point, and I don't want people to get obsessed about it, but because it closes the loop. Without measurement, we're guessing. With it, we can see the nervous system responding. We can adjust the protocol based on data, we can document recovery. Patients can feel improvement subjectively and see objectively. For people who've spent years being told their labs are normal while feeling terrible. That visibility, tracked evidence of change is often the most validating part of the entire process. But there's another layer to the biofeedback work that I think is equally important. The device doesn't just show you data, it trains you to feel it. Over time, patients start to recognize what regulation actually feels like in their body, not just as a number on a screen, but as a lived, embodied experience. And that matters enormously when we're trying to create lasting change. Because real change, the kind that sticks, requires your mind, body, and your emotions to be working together. Not just knowing intellectually that your nervous system is dysregulated, actually feeling the difference between a regulated and dysregulated state and being able to move toward regulation intentionally. That's what I'm building here. Biofeedback is the bridge between data and embodiment. The 12-week program includes HRV baseline assessment at the start, biofeedback instruction and the first few sessions, trend monitoring throughout, and formal reassessment at midpoint and at close. The invisible becomes visible. Progress is documented, and when something isn't working, we know it quickly and we adjust. So right now I have a primary cohort that is limited to 10 patients. I already have some on board. So if what we're covering in this series is landing for you, if you recognize yourself in any of these patient stories, the link to learn more about the coherence protocol is in the show notes. So no pressure, just information. The consultation is where we figure out together whether it's a good uh fit for you. So it is a complimentary consultation. You just gotta get online, fill out the form, and then I'll reach out to you, okay?

Key Takeaways And Part Three Preview

Sheri 19:21

All right, well, let's wrap this up and bring this episode together. HRV is the clearest window we have into nervous system function. It's not a wellness trend, it's a validated biomarker that tells you what your stress level, your sleep quality, and your symptoms can only hint at. And that's trainable. If your HRV trend is moving in the wrong direction, despite your best efforts, if the trend is flat or declining and you're not sure why, that's the signal that something more structured and consistent is needed. Data without intervention doesn't change anything, it probably just stretches you out more. Um, just one last story. I was at the gym and I was talking to someone about the aura ring, and um, she made the comment that she felt like uh the data was really great. Uh, but she looked at me and she goes, but I don't know what to do with it, but it's cool. So again, data without intervention, it doesn't change anything. Okay, well, I hope you join us for part three because we are going into acupuncture and herbal medicine through the lens of nervous system science. How these modalities work neurophysiologically, what research actually shows, and how they interact with the autonomic regulation we've been talking about here. And I'm also going to throw in some Chinese medicine uh uh theory along with that. So it'll be super fun. And I'm excited to put it together for you. So thank you so much for being here. If this episode was useful, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Also leave a review if you have a minute. It genuinely helps other people find the show. All right, well, I'm Sherry Davidson. You can find me at Element5, Acupuncture and Wellness, and you can find the Wellness Inspired Podcast wherever you're listening right now. All right, well, take a care of your nervous system, and I'll talk to you in the next one. Bye.

Subscribe, Communities, And Clinic Links

Sheri 21:22

If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and share with your family and friends. You can also give me a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. It helps others find me as well. To get updates on new episodes and wellness inspiration in your inbox, please join the wellness inspired community. Go to the wellness inspired podcast.com to sign up. I'll put the link to the website in the show notes so you can click and join. Also, there's a Facebook community at the Wellness Inspired, and you can follow me on Instagram at wellness underscoreinspired. If you're in the Houston area or just visiting and interested in our services, acupuncture, herbal medicine, cupping, zinchiatsu, or dry needling therapy, contact us. You can find out more on our website at element5om.com. That's element5thenumber5om.com. And again, I'll put the link in the show notes. If you're interested in health and wellness coaching, we can connect in the clinic or on Zoom. Reach out to us and we'll get you on the schedule. And as always, I would love to hear your feedback. I am dedicated to bringing you great content that is inspiring and informative with an artsy fun edgy spin. Thank you so much for listening. We'll meet here again next time. And remember, never stop exploring, learning, loving, and being you. Bye.