What is HRV Biofeedback?
Heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback is a powerful tool to increase HRV, overall wellbeing, resilience to stress, and cognition. It has also been proven to lower blood pressure and reduce anxiety and depression.
See this article for a guide to improving your long-term HRV with Guided Breathing and Biofeedback.
See this article for a breakdown of each available breathing pace.
When you navigate to the "Biofeedback" section of the app from the bottom menu, you'll be greeted with this screen:
What does the term "HRV Biofeedback" mean?
"Biofeedback" refers to a process whereby you take in information ("input") while attempting to make a change to your physiology. The biofeedback process is repetitive, where you get better at making that physiological change over time - with more "input" and practice.
In our case, "HRV biofeedback" uses HRV as the main "input" to help you make real physical changes that increase overall wellbeing, resilience to stress, and cognition.
What do I do during an HRV Biofeedback session?
In the most basic form, you would:
- Measure your HRV during the session, and in-between sessions (to track lasting change)
- Actively attempt to change your physiology, with deep breathing, meditation, mindfulness, or even singing or humming!
In the Elite HRV Biofeedback tool, we focus on deep breathing as the primary activity while measuring HRV.
How does HRV Biofeedback work?
The full answer is beyond the scope of this article. In summary, following structured breathing pace and patterns make physical changes to your nervous system. This change is seen with HRV tracking, sometimes in single sessions, and often over multiple days.
Your respiratory system and cardiovascular system (breath and heart) connect to each other and most of your internal organs through your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).
A healthy ANS can oscillate smoothly between "fight-or-flight" and "rest-and-recover" responses, depending on the situation.
Oftentimes, this is not the case due to an accumulation of chronic stress and trauma, and HRV can indicate this imbalance.
Just like exercise strengthens and tones your muscles, breathing HRV Biofeedback tones and physically strengthens your ANS, lungs, heart, and all the connecting systems in a balanced way. This creates resilience and an improved capacity to handle stress.
How do I start?
Simply log in to the Elite HRV app and tap the "Biofeedback" in the lower right of the main navigation menu. The main objective is to use HRV to find the right breathing pace and pattern that leads to a measurable increase in HRV, while still feeling "easy" for you to do.
Over time, Elite HRV will introduce tools and programs to personalize and walk you through this process.
Where can I learn more?
Check out this article:
Improving HRV with Guided Breathing