A Masterclass in Improving Your HRV - Dr Jay Wiles - #1049

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
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HRV is kind of like the new hot girl in school. Everyone's real interested in her, finding out where she's come from and what she can do and who she likes. Assume that I know nothing about HRV. What is it? What's it measure?

**Dr. Jay Wiles** (0:57)
The funniest thing about this, Chris, is that, let's say circa 10, 15 years ago, we would have never been having this discussion. So for someone like me who is early to the game in the field of HRV because I was exposed to it, let's say 15 years ago when I first started doing mostly clinical work. Now everybody has access to this. Because of the advent of wearable technology, we all have accessibility to something that you used to have to go into, let's say a specialized academic clinic in order to receive. So I worked at the Department of Veteran Affairs as a resident. And so within that context, I was exposed to it because we utilize three lead, six lead, 12 lead EKGs. And so these are 30,000, 50,000, 60,000 pieces of dollars worth of equipment. And so within that context, it's great to see now that we can all obtain this data. But the problem is that nobody actually understands what the hell this thing is.

**Chris Williamson** (1:54)
It's a cool new metric that nobody has a clue what it does.

**Dr. Jay Wiles** (1:56)
Yeah, indeed. So the way I like to explain heart rate variability is first by giving a broad definition of what HRV actually is. And then I like to backpedal a little bit because I think that the definition that I'm going to give is probably a little bit too broad. And heart rate variability in and of itself is actually quite nuanced. So when we think about HRV or heart rate variability, and I'm going to say HRV probably for the rest of the podcast because heart rate variability is a mouthful, HRV is the single greatest non-invasive proxy that we have for measuring the adaptations of the nervous system. HRV is a signal. It's a window into how the nervous system is responding at any given time or the time we're actually measuring it. And so when we think about HRV, I want people to think about adaptation, to think about resilience, and to think about flexibility. Those are probably three words that I'll use quite often within this context. So if it's looking at the adaptations of the nervous system, I like to backpedal a little bit and I explain what we mean by nervous system. Because I think a lot of people, they hear this word nervous system. It's kind of like one of those cool catch phrases in terms of people using the health and wellness sphere right now, that I don't think people actually fully grasp and understand what it is. So maybe it makes sense for me to explain the nervous system a little bit. Okay. So when we talk about nervous system, we're talking about a massive signaling highway. And when we think about a massive signaling highway, we think about nerve endings that are running throughout the entire body. So all the way from the brain and spinal cord out to the periphery of the body itself. And it's all about communication. It's all about sending signals and messages to and from the brain and the spinal cord out to the body, and then back up. So efferent and afferent signaling. The nervous system is not just in one location or in one area. So a lot of people, when they think about nervous system, they think about what's going on within the brain. That's the central nervous system. So the central nervous system is the brain and the spinal cord. But there are also other signaling highways, one being the peripheral nervous system, which is a larger umbrella term that people use. But within the peripheral nervous system, we have the somatic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system. Somatic nervous system is all voluntary. So it's movement, coordination, muscular contraction, whereas the autonomic nervous system is all about involuntary, or at least we thought it used to be all involuntary. And so this is things like managing things like your respiration, your blood pressure, heart rate, digestion. It's all kind of under autonomic or automatic control. So what does the autonomic nervous system even do? Like what do we need it? It's a threat detection signaling mechanism that we have built in from an evolutionary perspective. The great way to think about it is that it's constantly scanning our environments, receiving internal cues, external cues, and making adjustments to our physiology so that we can maintain balance, maintain homeostasis throughout the body. Because we don't want things dysregulated in one way or another, because that can cause pretty significant dysfunction from a mind-body perspective. So it's all intended to say, hey, let me zone in on which way I need to adjust. Do I need to move blood pressure up? Do I need to move it down? Do I need to increase heart rate up and down? It's kind of like this back and forth communication highway that we have.