Why Don't You Recommend 24 hour HRV Monitoring?

We don't generally recommend that you take 24/7 continual HRV readings; we believe that HRV gives the most valuable information when it is taken routinely and given context. Continual readings throughout the day do not include any context (unless you add it manually) and are subject to movement artifacts and disruptions. The changes you see in your HRV throughout the day are affected by too many variables; commuter traffic, an unpleasant email, etc.

Since your HRV is sensitive to stressors that you may experience throughout the day, during a continuous reading you'd need to make note of every occurrence that could cause changes in your HRV to make sense of the rises and falls of your HRV throughout the day. That's why we use 1 quick HRV reading at the same time every day to lessen the effect of these stressors on your reading, and gain a clear picture of your "chronic" HRV.

We talk about how taking one quick, routine reading per day reduces this noise and gives you a clearer picture of your Autonomic Nervous System activity in this article: Why Morning Readiness Readings?

You may still want to see how these more acute factors affect your HRV throughout the day without compromising your long-term HRV baseline. You can use HRV snapshots or HRV Open Readings for this purpose: When to Take HRV Readings Throughout the Day

Monitoring your HRV during sleep: We believe sleep is a valuable contextual data point in relation to your HRV. Tracking your sleep quality and quantity alongside your baseline HRV (that you've built using the daily Morning Readiness readings) can give you insight into how your sleep is affecting your HRV.

Tracking HRV all night would give you acute insight into how you slept, rather than into your long-term, "chronic" HRV. Overnight, you'll experience fluctuations in HRV due to circadian rhythms, any sleep disturbances, sleep stages, or sleep conditions you may have (ex: sleep apnea). These fluctuations in HRV would affect the final HRV calculation and are not necessarily indicative of your HRV baseline, which is what we are trying to build with the Morning Readiness readings. 

Generally, the accuracy of the HRV score will go up with the duration of the reading, but only to a certain point. Up to 5 minutes, the accuracy should increase. 

Longer readings, however, also introduce the possibility of more artifacts (from fidgeting, outside stressors like your phone going off, etc.).

Please note that readings longer than 20 minutes will not have the High Frequency peak calculated due to the processing power it requires. Additionally, PDF reports are only available on our Dashboard for readings 20 minutes or less.