Why follow your heart rate variability (HRV)?
Stress, recovery, sleep – following your HRV provides additional insights about your heart health.
Heart rate variability (HRV) has become a popular metric in digital health in tracking overall wellbeing. While HRV is not typically used in medical assessment for heart conditions, it is one useful marker for heart health and a physiological indicator for stress. CardioSignal shows a HRV trend view of your measurements for more comprehensive insights about your heart health.
What is it?
Heart rate variability refers to the fluctuations in heartbeat intervals. It is perfectly normal that the beat intervals vary as you breathe in and out. This variation is relatively small and happens in a millisecond range. Therefore, you need a specific software to access this information.
Good or bad? Remember the context
There are significant individual differences between people’s HRV levels, so there are no specific values for good or bad HRV. Constantly low HRV values are considered a sign of increased risk for future health problems while high HRV are usually linked to better heart health. However, consistent measurements are key, while a single HRV measurement is just a snapshot to your heart rate variability at a given time. One or two measurements every now and then are less likely to provide any meaningful insights.
For most meaningful insights, track your HRV long-term and measure regularly. This is how CardioSignal can support your HRV tracking:
1. Ensuring consistency
Regularity and repeatability of measurements is important in monitoring your HRV to achieve the best possible accuracy and comparability between readings. When you measure with CardioSignal, your body position, regularity of measuring, and the fact that you measure during rest, remain the same. This consistency also supports tracking your HRV. We recommend you set reminders for measurements in the morning and in the evening to maximize repeatability between measurements.
2. Measuring regularly
You might think of your HRV when you are feeling tired, or when you have exercised. However, only measuring on selected days might mean you miss the bigger picture. One single low or high reading is not always categorically good or bad. Frequent, regular measurements are likely to give you more comprehensive overview of your HRV development than infrequent measurements. What’s more, regular measurements are important in atrial fibrillation detection as well.
3. Keeping tabs on wellbeing & heart health
Creating healthy habits that support your heart health is a great way to start taking better care of your heart. Track your overall HRV trend and see how you can improve your HRV with healthy lifestyle, stress management and improving recovery skills. Monitoring your heart health and HRV can motivate you to maintain healthier habits.
Sources:
Cleveland clinic, Heart Rate Variability (HRV).
Posada-Quintero et al. 2019. Analysis of Reproducibility of Noninvasive Measures of Sympathetic Autonomic Control Based on Electrodermal Activity and Heart Rate Variability
Kim et al. 2018. Stress and Heart Rate Variability: A Meta-Analysis and Review of the Literature. Psychiatry Investigation 2018;15(3):235-245.
