To my daughters, Madeline and Felicity, may you always thrive by embracing your resonance and cultivating a life based on your inner light. Preface We spend years of our lives training to perform, whether it's on the field, on a stage, or in a boardroom. No matter how well prepared we may be, the pressure of performance often sabotages us when it matters most.
When a challenge presents itself, will you rise to the occasion and perform at your best? Or will you become overwhelmed, paralyzed, or derailed? To a great extent, the answer depends on your physiological stress response.
When facing a moment of intense pressure, whether you're an NBA player at the three-point line, a parent managing multiple children, or an executive preparing to give a presentation before a large audience, your body responds. Your heart rate increases, you breathe at a faster rate, your blood vessels constrict, and you feel a burst of energy from the release of stress hormones. All these things happen automatically because your body is biologically programmed to respond to stress as if you're in physical danger. The autonomic nervous system, ANS, the master controller of those bodily functions that occur without thought, such as breathing, heart rate, and digestion, begins preparing you to either fight or flee. This is called the fight or flight response.
Here's the problem, though. None of the stressful situations I mentioned above actually require fighting or fleeing. And the fight or flight response leaves you in a physiological state that is hardly conducive to peak performance.
It's nearly impossible to think clearly, make wise decisions, and perform confidently when your heart is racing, your breathing is ragged, and your hands are shaking. Surely you've experienced this firsthand. Thanks to the burgeoning field of sports science, we already have plenty of stress reduction techniques to boost performance. A quick search reveals a multitude of books filled with well-researched cognitive and behavioral approaches to battling stress.
Most of these focus on techniques to control your thoughts and modify your behaviors. The problem with these methods is that our physical response to stress is not only in our head. It's not just our thoughts that are causing stress hormones to flood our system or creating an erratic heart rate and breathing pattern.
We can't access a state for peak performance through mindset alone. That's because your stress lives in your body. There is, however, a scientifically proven, safe, natural way to rewire your body's baseline stress response and optimize your health and performance.
The breathing exercises and peak performance strategies described in Heart, Breath, Mind will take you on a journey from merely surviving stress to thriving despite it. A critical part of our work together will be developing your somatic awareness, a heightened consciousness of how your body is feeling, so that you will recognize when you are stressed and can take action to shift yourself out of a state of stress and into what is called parasympathetic dominance. You will learn how to rewire and optimize your body's natural, immediate, and automatic response to stress. You will learn how to replace negative emotions such as anger, guilt, and anxiety with healthier responses such as compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude, changing your heart rhythms in the process.
You will become adept at accessing flow, or what I call resonance, during critical moments so that you can more consistently perform at your prime across all of life's arenas. We'll start by using technology to help you find your ideal breathing rate, but with dedicated practice you'll be able to breathe without the technology, accessing your best self on demand and linking together your heart, breath and mind in the way nature intended. And it all begins in your body's most superb instrument, your heart. The new secret to peak performance. Most people are under the impression that their heart beats with the monotony and repetitiveness of a metronome.
On the contrary, when you inhale, your heart rate, the number of times your heart beats per minute, naturally rises. When you exhale, it slows down again. This is true for everyone. but the exact amount the heart rate accelerates on inhalation and how quickly it decelerates on exhalation vary quite a bit from person to person.
This range from your maximum heart rate to your minimum heart rate is your heart rate variability, HRV. In an ideal world, if electrodes were connected to your chest, your heart rate would show up on screen as big, beautiful oscillations. that rise and fall like rolling ocean waves. The greater the difference between the peaks and the valleys, the higher your heart rate variability.
High heart rate variability is what you need to thrive under pressure. It signifies the body's ability to quickly ramp up and feel a full range of emotions and energy, including stress when needed, and then swiftly and efficiently let go or recover. This dynamic allows you to effectively prepare for performance situations, navigate any challenges that arise, and then swiftly recover in between peak moments. Individuals with high heart rate variability have greater control over how their heart reacts under pressure and how quickly it recovers.
If you've ever found yourself feeling in the zone, like you're sinking every shot you make, be it at work or on the court, then you know what this feels like. It's a state of flow when your mind clears, muscle tension dissipates, and you feel confident making great performance easy. But prolonged stress decreases heart rate variability, diminishing the amplitude or height of your heart rate oscillations. If I hooked you up to electrodes and studied your heart rate on a screen on a day when you had lost money in the stock market, had a clash with your spouse, or arrived 30 minutes late for an important meeting, those beautiful oscillations would decrease in size and your heart rhythms might appear more erratic, signaling a system on high alert. With less variability in your heart rhythms and autonomic nervous system.
You are unable to pivot efficiently between different emotional states or to adapt flexibly to the stressors in your specific situation, including work, competition, and relationships. Low heart rate variability is, quite simply, the opposite of what you need for peak performance. Less variability between heartbeats indicates that the body is under stress and can increase susceptibility to health conditions such as depression, diabetes, heart disease, and more.
On the other hand, high heart rate variability is associated with psychological and physiological flexibility, cardiac resilience, and overall heart health. It is also known to enhance performance in a multitude of sports, golf, basketball, dance, baseball, gymnastics, and so on. At the core of Heart Breath Mind is a scientific process to systematically gain control over your heart, rewiring your stress response, and unlocking your highest potential for performance and positive health. Get out of your head and into your heart. You see, the heart is a muscle with far more responsibility than just pumping blood.
It is an essential part of your autonomic nervous system, featuring an acceleration system and a deceleration system that together function as your body's internal braking system. Heart rate variability is an indication of the balance within the two main branches of your autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system controls the fight or flight response, enabling your body to ramp up quickly to meet the demands of a stressful moment or prepare for elite performance. This is the branch that activates or increases the heart's action.
The parasympathetic branch slows the action of the heart, allowing your body and brain to rest, recover, and relax. The parasympathetic nervous system also handles your day-to-day vitals, like breathing, heart rate, digestion, and sexual arousal. It's sometimes called the rest and digest system. You can think of them as the gas pedal and brake of a car. The sympathetic nervous system is the gas, revving up when it detects stress or danger.
And the parasympathetic nervous system is the braking system to slow things down. In order to be able to accelerate and decelerate quickly like a high-performance race car, you need balanced and finely tuned sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Yet most adults have a dominant sympathetic nervous system and an underactive parasympathetic nervous system.
They have no problem feeling stress and physiologically preparing to fight or flee, even if the danger at hand is not a nearby hungry predator, but a looming deadline at work, a speech before a large crowd, or an upsetting conversation with a loved one. This isn't surprising given the world in which we live. In 2018, the most googled medical symptom in the United States was stress, topping the list in one out of every five states. Morning sickness was the frontrunner in Utah, and Maine seems to have an issue with night sweats. The American Institute of Stress lists the future of our nation, money, work, political climate, and crime and violence as the top five stressors for Americans.
We are a nation besieged by stress, whether it's related to career, family, finances, romance, current events, or health problems. Once you're ramped up, though, it's overly difficult for your physiology to recover. You're driving a car that has no trouble reaching a high speed, but is incapable of slowing down. This is true for most of us.
Think about it. When you narrowly avoid an accident on the way to work or school, or get into a heated confrontation with a family member, do you feel your heart rate speed up in the moment, then swiftly return to normal as you proceed with your day? or does it take you a while to stop ruminating or replaying the incident and release that stress? For most people, the latter scenario is more common and is indicative of sympathetic dominance, an overactive sympathetic nervous system that keeps you stuck in a state of fight or flight longer than necessary. Your physiology, your heart, is what's immobilizing you.
And because your psychological well-being is governed by your physiology, you must address your heart's response before you can control your emotions or thoughts. When faced with a challenge, will you become overwhelmed, paralyzed, or derailed? Or will you rise to the occasion and perform at your best level?
It's time to improve the way your mind and body react to stress. The meeting that changed everything. Fifteen years ago, I was working as a sports therapist at a collegiate counseling center treating student-athletes. I was frustrated by the fact that many psychological approaches weren't time-oriented enough for my clients. They wanted a process that was scientific, short-term, and effective to gain control over their emotions and consistently be able to perform at their peak.
Psychology was only getting them so far. All the positive self-talk in the world couldn't help a competitive golfer decelerate his heart rate and regain his fine motor skills when he was stressed before a putt on the 18th hole. When they were unable to self-regulate, their stress responses created poor performance that would undo countless hours, weeks, or even years of training. In 2004, I attended a presentation by Paul Lear, PhD, a Harvard-trained behavioral psychologist and a recognized authority in the field of heart rate variability.
After Dr. Lear finished his talk about HRV's link to health, resilience, and stress recovery, I introduced myself and asked him if HRV might hold promise for my athletes. Little did I know that question would alter the trajectory of my practice and career. Dr. Lear introduced me to Russian physiologist, Evgeny Vashilo, Ph.D., and his wife, Bronya Vashilo, M.D., both faculty members at Rutgers University and pioneers in the field of HRV. Evgeny Vashilo had spent years working with the Russian Space Program, developing stress-alleviating breathing techniques for cosmonauts. Drs.
Alir Vashilo and Vashilo had combined the principles of heart rate variability with a mind-body technique called biofeedback. in which one uses monitoring equipment to learn how to modify one's physiology with the intent of altering or enhancing some physical or psychological outcome. Classic biofeedback applications include learning how to lower blood pressure, control blood flow to the extremities, and reduce muscle tension.
In doing so, the Vashilo and Lair discovered a way to breathe at a specific frequency to increase... We hope you enjoyed this preview. To continue listening to this audiobook on Google Play Books, use the link in the video description.