How monitoring HRV helped me overcome lifelong anxiety - Nicola Adkin

In the world of Financial Services we love to achieve measurable outcomes in our projects and programmes and this is what attracted me to using ‘HRV’ or Heart Rate Variability as a way of tracking my own emotional wellbeing andmonitoring progress on my journey out of anxiety.  This technology was a game changer for me.

I am a self-growth junkie these days and love both the tooling and coaching.  I have personally invested heavily in this space for my own healing and for training and education to better serve my clients.

The idea of being able to demonstrate improvement in internal emotional health, as well as feeling better of course, excited me massively and still does.

I was no stranger to the Heart and it’s workings because my older sister was born with Congenital Heart Disease and life had always involved many visits and long stays at Great Ormond Street and the Royal Brompton & Harefield (where Gail died age 39).   Our family life involved a never ending conversation about my sister’s various Heart conditions.

I learnt overtime through my own battles with anxiety, which always felt like a sadness deep in the centre of my chest, that the heart was way more than a physical pump.  That it was deeply connected to the core of my being, my emotions and even my intuition. I started to feel it’s guidance very strongly back in 2020.  I personally experienced that heart health was very connected to emotional health and that anxiety was way more that just mental health – it was physical and mental and when unmanaged will lead to heart problems and other stress related illness.  I learnt that the heart was deeply emotional as well as physical, hence why I felt an almost pain there when anxious. 

Being able to manage our own emotion through the idea of self-regulation, i.e. practicing feeling differently was lunacy to me initially but through ‘playing’ with our emotions and feeling into different states like appreciation and gratitude, we can uplevel our ability to manage our own emotion and therefore improve heart and overall health.

The heart is the seat of our emotion and when we are not happy or living our life in a way that we enjoy, we feelsadness there.   We are out of alignment.

Alignment is spiritual and energetic – being in alignment means we are working and living the life that fills us with the most joy and therefore enables the free flow of energy through us into our experience.  Free flowing energy of motivation, purpose, meaning and fulfillment.

What we can see from HRV monitoring is how happy our heart is when beating, how uniform the beat to beat time difference is and the amplitude of the changes.   A good uniform happy HRV means we are naturally happy and effectively in alignment with what we’re doing in life.  The opposite applies, so disorganized HRV means there is more stress and frustration in our system so we are unhappy, therefore out of alignment with what we really want in our lifeand purpose.

We can improve HRV by breathwork and by managing our emotional state intentionally through self-regulation.  We learn to intentionally put ourselves in a certain emotional state, gratitude being the easiest to bring into our emotional field.  Feeling gratitude will help our HRV to be  more harmonious.  We are hacking our system using gratitude to improve HRV.

The mind blower is also that the heart ‘entrains’ all body systems and communicates intensely with the brain.  Good harmonious HRV means better mental and physical performance, more clarity and better focus.  

Good HRV really is a win-win for monitoring your physical and emotional health. Mind Body and Soul.

Next week I will be digging into my use of the mymonX to help me manage my ongoing stress and HRV – I cannot wait.

Nicola Adkin. To learn more about Nicola’s offerings, head to: https://app.paperbell.com/checkout/packages?provider_id=21559