What your HRV says about your nervous system, with Jane Ollis

So how often does it change? Because I know the wearables measure it daily and they can be a big, quite a big variation between like different days of the week and depending.

I'm still unpacking what actually impacts it on a daily basis because I know there's kind of like more seasonal trends where you can see the averages and I guess that's what we should be looking at.

But I had last week a random day where my HIV was like 93.

And I was trying to understand, like, what was doing so well? And I could have replicated after.

Yeah,

I know.

That's annoying, isn't it? You're trying to rack your brain and go, what did I do that made that the perfect HRV day? And I think, you know, we are complex, aren't we? And you might find that actually 93 could be your average, but things that tip it down are, you know, stresses that happen in your life.

The first time we did deep research actually into HRV was during COVID and we were funded by the UK government to look at whether HRV changes could be an early indicator of a viral infection.

So super interesting research to say, were there any other really nice, you know, early evidence-based biomarkers you could show that you're about to get sick? And we were able to show that HRV drops when the body's under attack by, in this case, a virus.

So getting ill or your immune system trying to fight things off will often send your HRV down.

Other things that can send it down, you might have had a week where you may not drink alcohol at all, which of course is, you know, exemplar.

Sure.

this is actually just a side note this is why i quit drinking altogether because i noticed the difference in my hrv and that terrified me enough to even i was never a heavy drinker but i would have occasional glass of wine and that occasional glass of wine will wreck my hrv not just for that night sometimes for a whole week and that was enough to kind of make me stop

Well, that's an incredibly powerful story.

And it does knock your HRV.

You would have seen that in your overnight data.

So I think what I'm trying to say is that life is constantly happening to us.

Our nervous system is constantly toggling between these two arms, between your sympathetic and your parasympathetic, depending on what's going on in your external world, what's happening within your body.

And so it's never going to be constant.

It's a variable.

And I think what I've learned about it is, It's going to change depending what life throws at me.

It's therefore how quickly can I recover that? So what's my recovery like and how do I go about doing that? And I think, you know, seeing when it does drop to say what is happening that I could perhaps change, you know, it is a valuable signal and it's one to pay attention to.

Absolutely.

And also to add another personal story, I completely agree in terms of COVID and or any diseases.

This is actually the metric.