What is Heart Rate Variability (HRV)?
HRV measures the variance in time between individual heart beats controlled by the autonomic nervous system, including the sympathetic nervous system controlling the body’s “fight or flight” response and the parasympathetic nervous system controlling the “rest and digest” response.
As an example, imagine a lion walking in to the room. If our nervous system is working properly, the “fight or flight”, or sympathetic response, elevates our heart rate and blood pressure along with other biological changes to help us survive. When the lion leaves the room, a healthy nervous system engages its parasympathetic or “rest and digest” function to then restore all systems to their resting defaults. When the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems perform this way, it is reflected by good (high) heart rate variability.
When a nervous system becomes excessively stressed and burn’t out, as reflected by poor (low) HRV, it becomes unable to effectively regulate its sympathetic and parasympathetic systems which can cause a global decrease in bodily performance. In lion terms, your body is acting crazy like the lion is incessantly knocking on the door. Common stressors includes poor nutrition, sleeping problems, work stress or physical injury. Common signs of a fatigued, unhealthy nervous system include performance deficits, fatigue, pain, mood changes, hormonal imbalances, metabolic changes and poor recovery.
Enter HRV testing.
By measuring the time between beats of the heart, advanced HRV testing technology can actually quantify the level of sympathy or. parasympathy being exercised by our nervous system, and for what purposes. We now have the ability to determine the nervous system’s health and effectiveness managing endocrine function, autonomic function and even stress. These metrics can then be used to optimize care plans, interpret recovery times and even help to qualify pain.
So what if your nervous system is run-down and dissregulated? Is their a solution? YES. The NeuFit Neubie, an advanced electronic stimulation machine, using a protocol call the “master reset”, interacts directly with your vagus nerve to improve nervous system health. Most people see a notable increase in their HRV after as little as 10 minutes of Neubie treatment! Although the Neubie does not take the place of necessary lifestyle modifications to reduce causal factors, it can be a highly effective tool to improve HRV and therefor increase performance, speed up recovery and even improve mood.