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The Heart in the Brain: Shift Your Perceptions, Manage Your Emotions and Reduce Stress to Prevent Heart Disease
March 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Posted by: Kathleen Daniel
Many wisdom traditions around the world speak of the heart as harboring its own Intelligence. Though I suspect many of us intuited a spark of truth in it, given the image of the mechanical pump we grew up with, it’s a notion we’ve tended to view metaphorically. Well, we were right! Over the last two decades it’s become clear that the heart is immensely more complicated – in constant communication with, and regulating the functions of the body and brain. What’s revolutionizing our view is a better understanding the role of emotions as reflected in our heart rhythms. Called “Heart Rate Variability (HRV), these rhythms respond instantly to stress – especially the stress of unmanaged emotions. A precursor to hormonal cascade of the ‘fight or flight’ response, HRV monitoring is quickly becoming a routine screening tool to predict many forms of heart disease. Here’s what we’ve learned – as well as a device that helps promote mindfulness, tapping into your heart intelligence to reduce stress and stabilize your heart rhythms.
* With its own nervous system, the heart can sense, learn, remember and make functional decisions independent of the brain.
* The heart communicates electromagnetically, so that an EKG signal can be picked up anywhere on the body, and the field permeates around us, radiating outward up to several feet, affecting the fields of those around us.
* Reclassified as an endocrine gland, the heart sends messages to the brain and the rest of the body through hormones that influences our emotional responses in and play a decisive and a pivotal role in how we feel and think, and especially in how we respond to stress.
Remember the definition of stress: It’s a reaction to a perceived threat, coupled with the perception that we have no control. It’s all perception.
Measuring How Emotions Affect Physiology
When we feel relaxed and emotionally balanced – ‘at home’ – heart rhythm patterns, measured electrically, show up as coherent. Neural information sent to the brain heightens mental clarity, improves decision-making ability, and can increase creativity. Positive emotions like appreciation, awe, gratitude, joy, curiosity, and love increase heart coherence.
Negative emotions like anger, anxiety, worry, and fear lead to disordered and incoherent patterns. These incoherent patterns correspond to the increased cortisol levels associated with stress response, putting us at increased risk for heart disease, loss of bone mass, fat buildup in arteries and redistribution of fat to the waist and hips. What’s new – and amazing – is the ability to measure the influence of emotions – mediated by the heart and recorded in our heart rate variability.
The Power of Emotion
Emotions give meaning to our lives, and, for better or worse, drive many of our decisions and actions. They come and go, faster than the speed of thought, showing up in brain activity before we even have time to think. We evaluate everything emotionally as we perceive it and think about it afterward.
Unfortunately we’re often at the mercy of our emotions, reacting to events rather than consciously choosing how to respond. Fortunately, you can decide to do something about it. You can learn to shift your perception.
Consciously shifting your perception shifts your physiology into a state of heart coherence – balancing your heart rhythms, nervous and electrical systems, and hormone levels – and allows you to consciously choose non-reactive responses, that can, not coincidentally – increase everyone’s coherence.
These two powerful tools move you from chaos to coherence. Use them when you need to slow down and reframe a situation causing you stress. Developed by the Institute of Heart Math, leading researchers in the field, the freeze-frame technique was studied in police using it to restore their heart rhythms after shooting incidents. Using the technique immediately after the shooting, they restored their heart rhythms within minutes, rather than the two hours it otherwise took when they took no deliberate action.
Freeze-Frame Technique
Perform the freeze-frame on-the-spot to shift your perception and access a more intuitive guidance when under stress. Beyond positive thinking, it’s a heartfelt shift in how you view a situation, a person or yourself.
1. Shift your attention out of your head, and focus on the area around your heart. Keep your attention there for at least ten seconds. Breathe normally.
2. Recall a positive time in your life or a positive feeling, and put yourself back into it so that you re-experience it. Don’t simply visualize it, but rather feel it fully by engaging all your senses.
3. Ask a question from the heart: “What can I do in this situation to make it different?” or “What can I do to minimize stress?”
4. Listen to the response of your heart.
You’ll likely feel calmer, confirm something you already know, or experience a shift in perspective, seeing the moment with more balance and perhaps a creative insight to resolve it. You may not be able to control an event but you can control your perception of it.
em Wave Desktop
Heart rhythm coherence is akin to the body/mind’s operating system. Learning what chaos and coherence feels like, and how to reestablish coherence, is a skill you can learn.
The emWave Desktop heart coherence training program also developed by the Institute of Heart Math, teaches you how to recognize – and recreate – feelings of coherence. When you become conscious of what an in-sync, balanced state of heart, mind and emotions feels like, you can recreate it instantly. The pulse sensor plugs into your USB port and displays your heart rhythms in real time while you play interactive games. The emWave Personal Stress Reliever is a portable device you can slip into your purse and take with you anywhere.
People use the portable device to “become coherent” and calm before a meeting and perform at their best, or before a family encounter they know will push hot buttons.
You’ll reduce stress and anxiety, build emotional resilience, increase your energy and focus, be more relaxed, improve your sleep and your long term ability to manage stress. You can even us it to break reactive habits of emotional eating, to heighten your creativity, to experience positive emotion at will, and facilitate access to meditation and prayer states.
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