Understanding HRV and Managing Stress with Matt Bennett

Stress is part of life, but learning how to handle it well can make a big difference for your health and well-being. When we don’t have the right tools, even small problems can start to feel overwhelming. The good news is, there are easy ways to bounce back and stay on track. But what if there was a way to actually measure how well you're handling stress? In this episode, I talk with Matt Bennett, founder of Optimal HRV. We dive into heart rate variability (HRV) and how it relates to your body’s ability to recover from stress. Matt shares how HRV tracking can give you early signs of health issues before symptoms even show up. He also talks about affordable tools and breathing techniques that can help anyone improve their stress response and build resilience. --- Listen to the podcast here: Understanding HRV and Managing Stress with Matt Bennett Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about stress and, in some aspect, our response to stress, because that’s one of the things that can really get in the way of us following our passions, and you can easily ruin a good reputation you built with one terrible stress response and that’s something that is really sad to see because we all are human and we all have the times where we don’t quite respond the right way but it can be a little bit difficult. So, one of the tools that a lot of people are using to manage their stress as well as their overall health is HRV which, my guest today, Matt Bennett, the owner and founder of Optimal HRV, is going to talk to us more about. --- HRV is the heart rate variability and, Matt, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show so it’s an honor to be on. Thank you so much for coming on and I want to start off with explaining to the audience to make sure we’re all oriented, I know some people are probably pretty familiar with what HRV is, others maybe not as much, but I think most people probably aren’t familiar with it and its significance on the level that you are. Really, when you get down to what is heart rate variability, it’s your body and mind’s ability to handle or recover from stress. And, as you said in your intro, the stress response is so fundamental to everything we do. Now, stress can be an illness. Stress can be a very, very difficult workout. Stress is often you talk about on your show, can be, I’ve got five, six hours of screen time today and we know that can add stress to the system as well. So, your ability to handle or recover from stress is the best foundational definition for heart rate variability that I have seen. Now, we’re doing that by measuring millisecond variations in your heartbeat, and I’m happy to explore the science behind that, but that gives us, I think, a good working definition to start out our conversation with. So you’re talking about like millisecond variance in heart rate and some people might be thinking why there should be variance at all because one of the key aspects of it that might be good to orient people to is that is there a too low, a too high number, or is it just a matter of keeping it at or above a certain level? Right. So, we’re in a time where consistency is usually leading to a good outcome. You and I want to turn our computers on and, for the most part, we want it to do the same thing it did yesterday and the day before. You don’t want to sit in your car and have it operate totally different than it did the last time you drove it. In this high tech environment, mechanized environment that we modern humans live in, consistency is usually equated with good quality. We are biological systems so this variation is actually a positive thing. Now, you could have variation in your heartbeats to an extent where you have a medical issue, arrhythmias and other things are obviously not what we’re talking about here and those need to be addressed with your medical provider. Those are usually bigger variations, though, so those are sort of we can put those aside because really not what we’re looking at with heart rate variability. So, we’re looking at, because the heart rate modulates with every inhale and exhale, and when we inhale, our heart rate goes up slightly. When we exhale, the heart rate goes down slightly. And so the more fluctuation we have there, you can think about this as flexibility, though, really, what we’re showing is the better we’re regulated from a stress perspective, the more we have our prefrontal cortex or executive functions available to us. So it is a really great biometric to show, if you think about executive functioning, cognitive functioning, emotional regulation, we’re emotionally regulated, we’re going to be better socially but also drops in heart rate variability because higher is better predicts a lot of chronic diseases. People were paying attention to it during COVID because it was an early indicator before symptoms. I would say 10 out of the 10 leading causes of death, the car accident one is the one that’s hard to measure with HRV, so nine out of the 10 are shown to, early on and throughout the course of the disease, see very, very significant dips in heart rate variability. So, I just want to make sure that we develop this foundation, this orientation that when you’re talking about heart rate variability, you’re not talking about how your heart rate goes up when you have a stressor response. So let’s say you have someone says something that triggers a traumatic memory and your heart rate starts going up because your subconscious memories start anticipating some sort of bad result, that fight, flight, freeze response, that’s not what you’re talking about. What we’re talking about with heart rate variability is that breathe in and breathe out. Well, yes and, because if you think about somebody experiencing, let’s just say, a minor stressor, because we’ll see this exaggerated with a fight, flight, or freeze response, for sure, but we know as cortisol levels or the stress hormone levels increase, our heart rate increases as well, so you don’t need an advanced degree in mathematics to know if you have more heart beats per second, the room for variation decreases just naturally. We get stress and our heart rate increases, heart rate variability is going to decrease dramatically. During something that may trigger, whether it’s just a stress response or a re-traumatization, we’re going to see more significant increases in heart rate, more significant decreases in HRV. So those are intertwined.Share on X There is an interesting exception to the rule where you could have a low resting heart rate but there still could be very little variation there as well. So it’s not always due to increases or decreases in heart rate. So, we are measuring –– and this is where heart rate variability is a much more sensitive and much more effective biometric for the stress response than heart rate alone. I see. So, when we talk about the stress response, that’s like kind of an acute reduction in heart rate variability, whereas if we talk about someone that’s generally unhealthy for the variety of reasons that people can be unhealthy, both physically and emotionally, and they can have a chronically low heart rate variability. So you think about something like burnout, for example, that is usually not something that you’ll experience at 1 PM this afternoon but then be totally healthy again at 3 PM this afternoon. It’s something longer term. So we’ll see HRV baselines dip for significant periods of time until that burnout is addressed. Same thing that if you have one of those big events, we can measure that acutely as well. So this is where it becomes such a powerful metric of overall health and wellness. And then can HRV be too high? Yes, but is it worth really talking about those small, small exceptions? Not really. Arrhythmias, for example, can cause that. There may be a handful of others that the research may point to. Bulimia, this is kind of the detail we have to get in. Folks that struggle with bulimia have higher heart rate variabilities. Obviously, that’s not a healthy sort of diagnosis to have so maybe because of the forced vomiting, we may see more vagal stimulation, but, as you see, we got to get lost in the weeds to get there. So, too high, maybe a percentage of 1 percent of the population really need to be concerned with your HRV is too high. The rest of us, we want our HRV to be high. I see. So it’s like the inverse of sodium intake, where it can be too low but it’s such a small amount and the real issue in our culture is, in that case, too high, but here it’s too low. And so when someone has a chronically low heart rate variability, does that show up in people’s daily lives, whether it be stress responses or anything else? A variety of different ways. We will see increases as HRV can be a predictor of a range of chronic diseases, so chronic pain, chronic fatigue, things like diabetes, those sort of things. So we can talk about a range of medical health issues associated with, again, chronic, long-term low HRV. Mental health issues as well, anxiety, depression, PTSD has been highly, as you talk about, trauma as well. Burnout. Long COVID is something that’s being studied because HRV gives you a great metric of recovery from that as well. So, chronic disease or a chronic mental health condition, that’s going to really impact your nervous system and that’s going to show up in your heart rate variability. Regardless, the good thing is we get this baseline so if you start a new treatment, start building new, healthier habits, that’s where we should see heart rate variability start to increase that baseline over time. So if someone starts a workout routine or just, I’m gonna, like, I don’t know, just drink less. ...