Stress-Control Tools That Start With Your Heart

We all know that stress takes a toll on the heart. But researchers at the HeartMath Institute, a group that studies "the physiology of learning and performance" in Northern California, are proving you can use your heart to prevent stress as well.

"If you plot the beat-to-beat heart rate [on a scope], then you'll see a pattern that gives you a window into a person's emotional state," says Deborah Rozman, PhD, coauthor with Institute founder Doc Childre of Transforming Stress: The HeartMath Solution for Relieving Worry, Fatigue, and Tension (New Harbinger, 2005).

"When people are feeling frustrated, angry, depressed or stressed-distressed, essentially-then the heart rhythm pattern is jagged and irregular-it looks like an earthquake. If you do a power spectrum analysis, you can see it's scattered; and you actually have less power to get things done, less accessible intelligence-all you can basically do is survive."

But, she says, you can change that by shifting your heart rhythm into a smooth or "coherent" pattern by activating better feelings. That's because stress is not caused by external events, according to HeartMath researchers, but by our emotional reactions to events. Therefore, we can take charge of our emotions by shifting our focus to those positive emotions that transform the heart's rhythm.

Rozman says all the HeartMath techniques begin by getting people out of their heads. "Focusing your attention on the area of your heart, for some reason or another, automatically starts to balance out the heart rhythm," she says.

"When you shift into coherence, all the frequencies line up, just like all the photons are lined up in a laser light. It's like shifting from the power of incandescent light to the power of laser. It's not just relaxation. Relaxation is a parasympathetic response; coherence is when the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems are not just balanced, they're synchronized. That's the first measure of being in 'the zone,' a high-performance state. You don't just relieve your stress with these techniques, you transform it into high performance."

Businesses, schools, healthcare agencies and law enforcement departments are utilizing these techniques through HeartMath's interactive software program called Freeze-Framer, Rozman says, which measures users' heart rates and displays a biometric image of their feeling states, while guiding them to transform stressed-out "earthquake" patterns into coherence using their own feelings. These organizations are teaching their members to take charge of their performance-limiting emotions to improve productivity and test scores, as well as to protect themselves from stress.

An ABC World News with Peter Jennings clip shows one police officer in a Santa Clara County (CA) municipality bring his heart rhythm to coherence using the software, installed right in his police cruiser, to help protect him from a family history of heart attack and stroke, after a particularly stressful response.

HeartMath's Attitude Breathing Tool
While Freeze-Framer offers the cool perk of visual feedback, it only teaches one technique. Transforming Stress offers four, including this one, which has three steps and takes less than two minutes.

Step One: Focus on your heart as you breathe in. Then, as you breathe out, shift your focus to the solar plexus, right below the heart. Breathe that way for 10-30 seconds-breathing in through the heart and out through the solar plexus.

This will bring you to a "neutral state." If you're really stressed out, or have been through a dangerous ordeal, you may have to do it for up to a minute.

Step Two: Now, select some kind of positive attitude or feeling. Rozman suggests something simple like appreciation. Something you enjoy and appreciate: your child, your spouse, a great vacation you remember, or even last night's poker game.

"So, now you keep breathing in through the heart and out through the solar plexus, while you're pretending to breathe that feeling or attitude in and out. It starts to shift your whole physiology back into coherence, back into that synchronized mode; so it's not just relaxation, it's energization," she says.

Step Three: "Once you feel the appreciation-or just the attitude of it, if you can't feel anything-you want to 'lock' it in by imagining that you're building and restoring that positive energy right into your body. Picture your cells recouping, your muscles regaining, your nervous system smoothing out. Feel yourself recharging your inner battery," says Rozman.

"You're still breathing into the heart and out through the solar plexus casually-you're not forcing it. You've done 30 seconds to just get it there, then you did 30 seconds where you were finding that positive attitude, now you want to lock it in for another 30 seconds. You just keep visualizing building and storing that positive feeling that appreciation gives you."

You can select the attitudes to breathe that will help you offset a negative emotion or imbalance of any stressful situation you're in, she says. "Breathe deeply with the intent of shifting any moment to a [better] feeling or attitude, from neutral-'Okay, I'm in this hairy situation, let me breathe in the attitude of neutral or balance'-to compassion or care, patience, clarity or anything. As long as it's a positive attitude: what you would really like to feel right then. You can use it in real time when you're in the danger zone.

"For example, we do training for trauma centers and emergency workers, and they learn to breathe in compassion and breathe out care for the patient; or breathe in balance so they don't get freaked out by the blood and gore, and breathe out appreciation that they're helping someone." You can breathe in any positive attitude that you can remember feeling and that helps you be what you want to be, she says.

"It imprints that whole attitude on your physiology and your heart-you 'put your heart into it,' and it's your heart that drives it. This creates the coherent rhythm that signals the brain, and then the brain signals the immune system and the hormonal system, renewing them. It's a way to reboot your whole internal system."

For more information, see www.heartmath.com.