Richard Jacobs: Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the future tech and future tech health podcast. We have Kevin Andrews. He is the managing director at heartmath. The website is heartmath.co.uk. So again, thanks for coming. How are you doing today?

Gavin Andrews: I’m doing great. We should, yeah, thanks very much. Um, so yeah, as you said, I’m, I’m the director of heart math in the UK is actually a US-based business, so headquarters all over there and I run the business for them under license in the UK and Ireland and increasingly other bits of Europe popping up. So yeah, so the website in the UK and headquarters in the US is heartmath.com.

Richard Jacobs: Okay, great. Excellent. And then, um, yeah, I’ve seen heartmath at several conferences throughout the year. Never heard about heart rate variability. Well, I’ve never looked into it, so that’s why I wanted to have you on. It seems like a, a trend that’s uh, you know, the sports and the health world is becoming very big. So what is a heart rate variability?  You know, just start off with.

Gavin Andrews: Yeah. Okay. Well, in simple terms the heart rate variability is just the beat to beat changes in the heart rate. So it starts with rhythm, basically. Hearts always speeding up and slowing down. Um, so even if you’ve got a heart rate, resting heart rate sat a region of 60 beats a minute, your heart is not beating one set from second. In fact, you’d be dead if it was. So what’s really happening it’s just speeding up and slowing down and that’s based upon what’s going on with the autonomic nervous system, what your body requires of the autonomic nervous system and your heart. And so it’s a really interesting measure for looking at the dynamics of the autonomic nervous system. Um, you know, what it’s doing, how, how activated it is or how relaxed it is, what the interplay is really between the branches of the autonomic nervous system.

Richard Jacobs: Hmm. So, so people’s heart rates, you know, I know if you get stressed or if you’re sleeping or if you meditate or things like that, you know, the heart rate changes. But, uh, what is the natural variability look like in a healthy versus an unhealthy person? And why do we think variability occurs?

Gavin Andres: Well, um, so what’s healthy really depends upon the individual and their age and their gender. Um, so as opposed to the kind of giving you numbers around that, um, what I can say is that generally more is better than less. And so the reason we have variability really it’s just to enable us to respond to the demands of the day. Um, whether that be running for the, for the bus or whether that be sitting down and digesting our dinner on, on the sofa as we watch TV. Um, just anything and everything throughout our day require that our autonomic nervous system responds appropriately. And heart rate variability really is a, is a window into that. And it’s evidence that we’ve got the flexibility, the elasticity, if you like, to be able to deal with these challenges, both, both large and small. Um, I’m really, when it comes to a stress reaction, you know, this is, this is an evolutionary thing. It means that the body is able to respond dynamically when we need to fight or run away or play dead or whatever it might be. Um, that’s when the heart rate variability becomes very, very important. And really you want more of it than less because that’s going to enable you to, to respond appropriately and basically survive if your life’s in danger. But like I said, it’s not always that extreme. It’s just genuinely responding throughout the day. Space links as well as Katie rhythms and breeding and metabolism, emotions and your immune system. So everything really is connected in this feeding in a, and the variability is a really, really strong and independent marker actually thought for health, both physical, physiological, and also psychological or mental health and proceedings.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah. Well, okay, so if your heart rate couldn’t vary, right? If you were under a physical strain, it couldn’t accommodate, um, you know, I guess it couldn’t bring enough oxygen and, and uh, and blood to the muscles to be able to let you perform, etc. But, uh, you know, going deeper, what is the function of heart rate variability? You know, every day, every, I guess, typical day to day function.

Gavin Andrews: Well yeah, that is, that is, it’s functionary. It’s just to enable you to respond appropriately. So it’s being heart rate variability is really just a reflection or a measure, uh, of, of what’s going on. So yeah, based upon the demands around you, um, your heart needs to be responding appropriately. Your autonomic nervous system needs to be speeding up and slowing down appropriately. Coming back to balance. Um, so this is also connected to homeostasis, which you probably heard of, which is the body just regulating itself back to balance. Um, so there’s a measure is useful both in real-time to show us the dynamics of what’s going on there. And then it’s primarily what we use it for, but it can also be useful to track over time as well to see within an individual the extent to which they are being depleted throughout the day. So how much sympathetic or kind of like accelerator activity have they got going on and then how much parasympathetic or rest or digest activity they’ve got going on. So what we want to see generally speaking in the days of this balance between the two, um, and then what, what we do, let’s see in, in some individuals is that their heart rate variability is low and that’s a really good marker for the fact that they’re, they’re getting a bit rundown, overwhelmed. Um, maybe even burnt out.

Richard Jacobs: Why would the variability go down if they’re getting rundown?

Gavin Andrews: Uh, because basically, the body is having to respond to, we’ve had them, so it’s having to work extra hard. So if they’ve not been having the sleep for example, and not been eating particularly well, then the body is under stress and if the body’s under stress then to work harder and harder to bring itself back to balance. So generally that reduces HIV. Except we see people, if we track people, we see their HIV declining over time, it can be a very good sign you’re there, but they’re getting too, too stressed and they need to the rest recuperate back off. Um, occasionally, you can see HIV leap up and can even happen overnight, particularly with, with athletes. And what that shows is that they basically, they go overtrained. And so what’s happening there is the autonomic nervous system has kind of given you some warnings for time saying, Hey, I’m being to challenge heart rate variability is going down your, you know, you should be feeling a bit tired and maybe achy and not having sort of energy that you used to have and then basically if you don’t listen to those signals from your body, then the body will act. And so what happens is the passive athletic comes on hard. So it’s like, it puts the brakes on really hard stay. Hey, I’ve given enough warnings, slow down now. It’s time to relax otherwise I will force you to do it so that, that can be one case where the heart rate variability suddenly becomes very high. But normally what we see when people are stressed is that it’s lower than it should be. Your declines over a period of time.

Richard Jacobs: What are you’re, I don’t know. What if you are just sitting there and you’re reading a book or if you’re talking to somebody, what’s, uh, does the heart rate vary? And you know, how much does it vary in typical people, even when they’re not doing anything special?

Gavin Andrews: Yeah, it should vary too. Even while you’re doing nothing, which might sound a bit counter-intuitive, you might expect that the body should be really efficient and that therefore if your heart rate high as being 60 times in a minute, then it should be beating 170 seconds. So intuitively that’s as what you think would be optimal, but that’s not the case. So it is always very, even if you sat down reading a book, um, and okay, so like in a, well, I’m a 47-year-old guy. I’m, I’m, have to practice with preacher exercising, eat relatively healthy food, you know, everything balanced, et cetera. So if I was sitting down after a call, it’s the evening here in the UK, I’m reading my book, my heart rate variability might be, um, ranging anywhere between 50 and maybe 70 beats just as I’m sat there. So the variability in those in that sense would be around a range of 20 beats, now, yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m healthy for my age, but um, we want to be seeing some variability even when people are sat down and rest. In real-time it includes breathing deeply by holding my breath or having, you know, stressful thoughts and feelings I need to my system that’s going to impact on it as well. So it’s not like HIV is, it is a, or the amount of HIV you’ve got is a rigid or set thing. That’s not the case at all. Um, but yet to your point, even when you sat down, relaxing, doing nothing, your heart rate is always speeding up and slowing down. Um, basically it’s there to facilitate everything in the body to do with regards to repair process. You know, let me stay sis. Um, and it’s, they’re actually doing that in case you need to respond dynamically. So I could be sat reading my book, very, very relaxed heart rate’s nice and low. Um, but then it could be a live noise outside your car might backfire or someone might bang on my window or whatever and I might some that have a shock. Well if I don’t have a variability, I don’t have the elasticity and the flexibility, then I can’t respond and actually know it. Worst case scenario, if I didn’t have a lot of variabilities, I can even have a heart attack with a shock like that. So you know, this is, this is really what’s going on. It’s just a body’s way of keeping yourself flexible and adaptable so that they can respond appropriately to any, any, any need that requires.

Richard Jacobs: So what’s a typical variability, you know, for someone that’s sedentary versus an athlete?

Gavin Andrews: This is, this is kind of tricky territory when I don’t want to be giving numbers out when this then concern people, but okay, as a 47-year-old guy, if my variability and there’s liberty, there’s like 40 odd different measures of variability as well. So I use simple measure, which is simply kind of Max mean in terms of the heart rate. So as a 47-year-old guy, my maximin was only, how do I, two, three, four beats or something like that, that would indicate I’m all very healthy. Whereas someone who’s doing, you know, The Julian Sports, um, you know, is, is, is really accomplished cyclists, distance runner, triathletes, something like that. Yeah, they could have a variability. You have 20, 25 30 beats. So, you know, it’s different for different people. There’s a genetic component. It does, it does vary at the moment. Just having a coffee or something like that or eating certain types of foods can impact it. But generally speaking, more is better than less. And if you, we know from all the science and the research that if you have less than you shouldn’t have for your age and gender that does not bode well for your health.

Richard Jacobs: So you said there’s more than one way to measure it instead of just, what are some of the ways that it’s measured and what are those ways mean?

Gavin Andrews: Well, so in the simplest sense, the way the heart rate variability is measured, we, we call our it tools and, and so basically you’d met, you’re measuring the gaps between the heartbeats but in simple terms and then sorts also different ways of, of, of crunching that data. Now Algorithms and forbidden as it can be used. So typically we have different measures like in research, SDNN or MSD. Um, and so, you know, depending on, on, on the application, researchers tend to use those types of numbers and some of the apps that we see on the market, they’re using those types of, uh, approaches, measurements of HIV in the background. Um, but then they’re often creating their own numbers around that. Um, so you may have like, luckily HIV and isolate people at that, they, they, they tend to have their own proprietary number. Um, so you know that after a while your number ranges kind of, you know, between 1775 or something like that. But that number is actually being calculated using some of these other research measures. Um, in our RMS, LSD is a, is popular, we’ll have basically a measure the parasympathetic. That’s does not what we do. It’s not what heartmath is really interested in. Um, we’re not primarily about HIV. HIV is just a way of measuring the state that we, uh, help people learn how to get into an ultimate stake or coherence. Um, sorry, just to clarify, heartmath is not really, we are not really an HIV business. We’re not really a technology business as such. We’re a, uh, well actually a transformation business. We help people learn how to increase their self-awareness and regulate their, their thoughts, their feelings, their emotions, their behaviors. Um, and the state that we help people learn how to, to create or to access can actually be measured with HIV. So it’s kind of almost when in fact, in many ways the HIV side of things is an accident for us. We, we as a business developed, um, these different, very simple self-regulation techniques, um, way back in 1980 to kind of the business in 1991. And as a training company, we’re teaching these techniques before we even realize that heart rate variability is something that could be used to, to measure what it was we were creating. So we’re a bit different to everyone else. The heart rate variability data that you might get in your apple watch or your Fitbit or that you might be deriving from a chest strap if you’re using elite HRV or athlete. Those types of Apps, um, they’re different from what we did. I used them myself that the great measures were primarily there for checking in with yourself to see each day or how am I doing, how’s my battery off, I drain my battery too much? Uh, is it nice and topped up? So the main application, so you know, there’s a sport and readiness to train or those types of things really useful for, for those types of applications. Um, but that isn’t primarily what we’re about. In fact, not what we’re about at all. We’re about is it’s these practicing a very simple technique that facilitates putting your autonomic nervous system into balance. Uh, and that enables you with practice to develop. Letting the self-awareness and the ability to separate, you know, your, your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Richard Jacobs: So if I’m a, you know, I get the tools and if I’m stressed, you know, teach me ways to relieve that stress much quicker than I otherwise would have before, I’ll do some sort of exercise or breathing, thinking or combination of those two. And I should be able to, let’s say, slow my heart or, uh, increase the variability or improve some kind of metric pretty quickly by doing it.

Gavin Andrews: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So that’s what we’re using Erik technology for. So the techniques are based upon, um, first of all focusing at the head and into the body. So particularly focusing around the heart area itself, um, regulating the breathing. So we’re gonna look at balanced breathing technique, um, and the balanced breathing is basically, it’s kinda hacking into the alternative nervous system. And so you’re putting autonomic, you’re consciously taking control of your autonomic nervous system. You’re putting it into balance, or the balanced breathing is activating the sympathetic and parasympathetic, um, imbalance of it. They’re synchronizing. Uh, and then once you’ve done that, it’s a great way to just begin to, to stop stress in the system. Uh, and then when you’ve done that, you can then shift the feelings or the emotion. So you can, for example, recall, um, your people, things that you feel appreciation or gratitude or care or love for whatever. So you’ve taken petroleum or somebody’s nervous system, then you start to impact upon the hormonal system. Um, and all of this information that the heart is creating, sending to the rest of the body. And the brain, in particular, is then resulting in, um, having more activity in the prefrontal cortex. So therefore, you know, if you’re stressed and you do this, you get the activity back in prefrontal cortex and you can begin to think much more logically, rationally objectively, and you know, you can do all the wonderful skills that you will be to be like, empathize and be creative and innovative. And so, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s something that we train people to do and we advocate that they do on the one hand, kind of like a meditation. So there’s a dedicated practice that you do each day for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes or whatever. Um, and then also throughout the day as a, as an eyes open in the moment techniques of [inaudible] stress when we, you know, in a business meeting and um, you know, colleagues are disagreeing with you or whatever, or having an argument with your, your partner or you might be stuck in a traffic jam and getting stressed about getting somewhere than these types of designed all suited to use real-time eyes open in the moment.

Richard Jacobs: Hmm. So what is, what have you tried, what current techniques and um, you know, has it been surprising to you? Like what, what’s an experience you’ve had that you thought it was really cool or uh, yeah, super helpful to you.

Gavin Andrews: So for me, my, my daily practice is, um, I do 21 minutes practice a day of tetany weak or heart locking. So the 21 minutes things, just because someone told me that it takes 21 days to, to create a happy site. I challenged that community because you do 21 minutes and 21 days, but they didn’t tell me it was 60 days. So I carried on doing that. But for me, what that’s all about is I’m spending dedicated time each day where I’m really focusing, you know, inside myself. It’s a reflective practice and what I’m doing is I have my attention in my heart regulating my breathing so it’s nice and smooth and sustained as an equal volume flowing in and flowing out. And then I’m focusing my, um, my feelings around genuinely people for me that I appreciate or care for people I feel compassion for. I’m a part of the practices is radiating those feelings, act to others. And then on the in-breath breathing in for myself. So it’s not, you know, it’s not massively dissimilar from compassion meditation or the Metta Meditation and Buddhist might do or whatever. Um, but I’m using the technology where I’m doing that to track their numbers, to see how coherent I’m getting. Um, because there are degrees of concurrence and balance within your tonic nervous system. Um, and so I find that the numbers are really useful because they also let me know how I’m doing each day. They keep me real in terms of ways I think I’m feeling or experiencing. Um, and I like the fact that I can look back at data over extended periods and then, yeah. Look at how I’m doing, how I’ve been developing periods in my life when I’m getting better at it or times when it’s more challenging for me.

Richard Jacobs: Well, what have you noticed specifically as you’ve done it, you know, overtime when, you know, what was it like in the beginning? What was it like after a few weeks of it and what did you notice?

Gavin Andrews: Yeah, So we did it for 10 years. Um, oh, I can, well, I can say to you is that I used to be a very stressful person. I used to get very anxious about my work, performance at work. I used to catastrophize situations and relationships. Um, I used to regularly, you know, be alien in terms of bugs and colds and flu and things like that, which are pretty certainly in hindsight was thanks to the fact that I was spending quite a lot of my time stressed. Um, so when I discovered heartmath, you know, I’ve been into lots of different things and tried lots of different approaches. Um, but when I came across the word, what I love was the simplicity. Um, and why notice quickly was that I can create calm within myself, both physically and mentally very, very quickly, just within the space, initially of the mineral to the green practice. And then what I thought was really caused the fact that I could in effect choose how I wanted to feel and until at a time like sort of been on autopilot and just feeding while it’s feeling based upon what was going on around me or whatever popped into my head and really occurred to me that I might have some choice around what I feel and when I feel it. So the fact that I could just, you know, take an on the day and intentionally focus on appreciation or gratitude or whatever, I found that to be extremely enjoyable. Um, and over time with practice and you know, this stuff’s not magic. He indicates up to you, put time in, but it doesn’t need a lot of time in my experience, but it’s timing and it begins to have an impact. And so what I find out at the time was I was just getting less stressed. Um, it’s almost like the bottle was being raised on what was required to stress me. Um, so, you know, I was, I was, I was just hooked. I was convinced it works and that’s why I carried on doing it. So I actually was practicing all this stuff, a good few years, but before you can go out and vote in the business.

Richard Jacobs: So you’ve noticed that you’re a different person, you’re a lot calmer and you don’t have these, these issues you had before?

Gavin Andrews: Absolutely. Yeah. Think some, you know, it’s, it’s a wonderful thing. I notice, I mean, it’s been a long time since I had any gaps in my practice now. But I also notice back then was if for whatever reason I stopped practicing, which attended to do when, when, when life was good and I was feeling good. It’s almost like just saying, well I don’t need to do this now because everything’s fine. And then, sure enough, it’s like a muscle and a muscle gets a bit weaker. The old patterns begin to creep back in again or you know, the craziness of life starts to trigger you again and the tolerance level for stress goes down. So yeah, for sure. I’m a, I am obviously I’m the same person in many ways, but I’m a different person in terms of my outlook on life. Um, the situations I choose to put myself in, um, I keep myself a lot more self-care and compassion for what I did and the decisions I make and the work that I do. Um, and generally enjoy life a lot more. I mean even to the extent of things like, you know, sport, I’m a very, very amateur triathlete. And in the past the recognized, I never even really used to enjoy it a lot of the time, but it was just pushing myself so hard. Every time I trained to be faster, I had to compete and beat my friends or always be the previous time or whatever. And actually, I wasn’t really enjoying myself. Whereas now I just do it for the sake of doing it. Um, you know, listen to my body a lot more. I enjoy the experience and the process of the training and, and enjoy the competition days much more as well. So it’s just a different way of being read.

Richard Jacobs: That’s great. So what’s the protocol for a new people that want to, uh, you know, work on heartmath? Do they start with a device and then they do training with a device? So they do the training first on their own? How do people get on board?

Gavin Andrews: Yeah. So, okay. So, so the simplest way to onboard is this quite a lot of free information online anyway in terms of the techniques. There’s some stuff on there that can kind of get you up and running. Next thing to do if you want to dip your toe into the water is we, we’ve written the number of books. Um, so we’ve got a book called “Transforming Stress” , which is particularly good in terms of helping people understand the physiology of stress and also then how it’s impacting on the brain and then explaining some of the heart by techniques and how and why they work and what the hope of HIV is. So, you know, that’s the price of 10, $15 for a book. Um, and then the next, uh, next step up from that is the biofeedback technology. So the biofeedback check is $159 in the United States and 159 pounds in the UK. Uh, and that is kind of, it’s kind of like a Fitbit for the emotions really. Um, it’s just a little sensor. Bluetooth sensor goes on yellow tips on Clothing Cause Bluetooth to your phone. Um, and its specifically measuring heart rate variability coherence. So it’s not measuring those other types of heart rate variability that some of those other devices measure. Um, you know, for sport or whatever, we specifically and solely interested in coherence. And we’re interested in measuring it real-time so that when you practice the techniques, you can see the impact that you’re having through the heart rhythms and you can see the levels, the degree of coherence that you are achieving in the session. So, um, so yeah, that’s the level. And then you know, within the app itself, there’s all sorts of instructions, guided meditation with videos of how to use the technology and what the metrics mean and all that cycle, that type of thing. Um, and then really the next step up from that is, uh, is people who want to use this system with others. So I just finished actually on Friday, um, getting me one of our coach programs. So we train people to be coaches in the heartmath system. Uh, and they, they could be stick at the stores, go choose, they could be educators, they can be medical professionals that are cardiologists on the hospital. And actually, um, yeah, hockey coach we had, um, and uh, you know, people like business coaches, consultants, trainers, so all sorts of different people who just recognize that this is, this is actually very, very simple skill and that there’s still the self-awareness and self-regulation are extremely valuable no matter what you do, no matter who you are, whatever walk of life. And so we train people too, to go out there and share these techniques and the coaching worlds and protocols with others. People, you know, they’re experts in that they have passionate.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Yeah. That’s wonderful. So, all right. So the best way for people to take the first step is to, uh, I guess go to heartmath.com or heart math.co.uk?

Gavin Andrews:  Yep. Yep. For sure. Yeah. And get in touch to there or just drop us an email, either on info@heartmath.com or info@heartmath.com.uk, um, with any questions or anything that would, we can, we can get back and let people know what their options are.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. All right. That’s great. Well, Gavin, I don’t, I don’t have the heart to tell you that we’re out of time. Thanks so much for coming. It’s been super useful and I really appreciate it.

Gavin Andrews: Great. Thanks, Richard. Thanks.