Daily Heart Rate Variability Training – 30-Day Personal Challenge Wrap-Up
Improved Sleep & a Welcome Escape
My 30-day heart rate variability training challenge is almost over. This meditative practice hasn’t made me superhuman. It hasn’t fixed all my voice problems. Yet. But it has helped me fall asleep faster at night. It has also given me an enjoyable daily escape from the stresses of life.
Today is day 28 of my 30-day challenge. I’ve used the HeartMath Inner Balance Trainer for at least 10 minutes every day, except two. My goal was to breathe deeply, focus, and get into a calm high-coherence state.
If you missed my article when I began this challenge, the HeartMath Inner Balance Trainer is a free iPhone/Android app that pairs with a device that clips onto your earlobe. It measures your heart rate variability coherence, which HeartMath Institute describes as “the synchronization of your physical, mental and emotional systems… It’s a state of optimal clarity, perception and performance.”
Time & Place
I tried doing my heart rate variability training at different times of day and in different places:
- Early in the morning
- During my lunch break at work
- Outside in nature
- With my toddler son
- Before bed
- During middle-of-the-night wake-ups
For me, staying in a high-coherence state requires great focus. So it’s best to find practice in a calm, quiet place.
I’ve found my favorite time to practice with the Inner Balance Trainer is right before bed. That’s mainly because it quiets my mind and improves my sleep. It’s relatively easy to fit into my bedtime routine. It puts me in a relaxed state quickly and helps me fall and stay asleep.
An Easy Daily Practice
Using the HeartMath Inner Balance Trainer has been enjoyable and reinforcing. It’s one of the only meditative practices I’ve stuck with for close to 30 days in a row.
I’d say the positive effects most remind me of yoga, nature time, journaling, or focusing on the flame of a candle. Even though all these meditative practices are incredibly beneficial, I’ve struggled to find the discipline for daily practice. The HeartMath Inner Balance Trainer has been easier to make a daily habit. I think that’s because the app provides built-in reinforcement by providing real-time feedback, and also tracking session time, challenge level, coherence score, and achievement points.
The Meditative Experience
The HeartMath Inner Balance Trainer is easy to use. It has 4 different screens you can swipe between while you’re in a heart rate variability training session.
The main screen has a colorful circle that expands and contracts to act as a breath pacer. You can customize the breath pace. The default is 4 seconds, and that seems about right to me. The colorful rectangles around the circle appear one at a time, showing green for high coherence, blue for medium coherence, and red for low coherence. Your real-time heart rate variability is shown at the top of the screen.
The second screen is a beautiful landscape photo of mountains and a sunrise. The breath pacer moves to the top of the screen as a black dot that moves left and right with each inhale and exhale. The colored dot near the top of the screen shows your current level of coherence by color.
The third screen is a session dashboard, showing your real-time coherence score, session length, and achievement points. There are large graphs that track your heart rate variability and coherence over time.
The fourth screen is another session dashboard that displays large graphs of your pulse and frequency spectrum. The spectrum graph is a mathematical transformation of the heart rhythm data into a frequency spectrum. Low coherence looks like a wide spectrum of frequencies. Very high coherence looks like a narrow spectrum of frequencies, with the graph showing a single peak in the middle of the graph.
Additional Benefits
So the most noticeable benefits of the HearthMath Inner Balance Trainer have been improved sleep and a nice escape. But this practice has also helped me look at life with new perspective. I’ve been pondering the big picture in different ways, including the long game, how my daily routines affect my whole life, and how I affect other people. I’ll be interested to see how these benefits continue to develop, as I plan to continue to use the Inner Balance Trainer beyond my 30-day challenge.
If this meditative practice sounds intriguing to you, I encourage you to try the HearthMath Inner Balance Trainer for yourself. The app is free, and the device costs $129 wired or $159 wireless. Or you could experience the same type of benefits for free in other ways, like yoga, journaling, nature time, lighting a candle, or with whatever practice makes the magic happen for you.
