Heart, Breath, Mind - Leah Lagos
Train Your Heart to Conquer Stress and Achieve Success
We know many approaches to mentally prepare for and handle stress situations. But stress lives in the body, and much fewer people have looked at deliberately preparing their body for it.
On inhale the heart rate naturally rises, and on the exhale it slows down. The amount of this difference is captured in the heart rate variability HRV.
[bq] “Low heart rate variability is, quite simply, the opposite of what you need for peak performance. Less variability between heartbeats indicates that the body is under stress.”
Sympathetic nervous system: fight-or-flight. Ramp up demands and prepare for peak performance.
Parasympathetic nervous system: rest-and-digest. Slow down the heart, control digestion and sexual arousal, and relax.
HRV is an indication for how well the two systems are in balance.
[bq] “Most adults have a dominant sympathetic nervous system and an underactive parasympathetic nervous system.”
[bq] “You’re driving a car that has no trouble reaching a high speed but is incapable of slowing down.”
The book outlines a 10 week program to get control over your heart via breath, and ultimately influence your mind.
I. Laying the Groundwork
1. The Importance of Training Your Heart
Heart is just like any other muscle in that it has a muscle memory that can be trained.
Up to 1970s it was believed that the brain fully controls the heart, but now we know that it’s a constant bidirectional dialogue.
With erratic heart pattern, higher functioning of brain gets put on hold, resulting in fight-or-flight response and avoiding “paralysis by overanalysis”.
High HRV means strong adaptability to stress and environment.
Need to both strengthen the parasympathetic nervous system and dampen the response of the sympathetic nervous system.
The baroreflex maintains blood pressure, triggering a rise in blood pressure 4-5 seconds after inhale, and a drop 4-5 seconds after exhale.
Most of us breathe faster than their baroreflex, but we can alter our breathing patterns to influence it.
When you sync your breath rate to your baroreflex, you strengthen the response and increase your HRV. Calls this state resonance or flow.
Vagus nerve connects brain with body’s main functions, like heart and gut. 80-90% of the flow actually happens from body to brain, not the other way round.
Trauma and painful experiences can get stuck in our physiology. Then our own bodily sensations become our enemy.
HRV training can also help resolve these issues.
2. Building a Life of Resonance
The most common resonance frequency is at about 6 breaths per minute, but it can be anywprhe from 4 to 7.
Breathing at resonance frequency and strengthening the baroreflex has many benefits:
Less mind chatter and more control over your thoughts
Relieve many medical conditions related to ANS dysfunction, e.g. high blood pressure, anxiety, GI troubles, etc
Get better at connecting with positive emotions and trigger them
Increased stamina
Better emotional regulation and overall mood
More empathy
3. How to Use This Book
HRV measures the variability in RRI, the interval between heart beats.
For the training, need a breath pacing app, and optionally an HRV sensor and app.
App should allow you to set precise breathing frequencies and be visually pleasing to you.
E.g. Elite HRV, Awesome Breathing, Breathe2Relax,…
HRV sensors mainly come in three varieties:
Chest straps
Finger clips
Phone apps that use the camera pressed on the skin
Should not monitor HRV on a daily basis during training. In many people this can have the opposite effect desired and cause more anxiety.
Should only track at regular intervals, during weeks 1, 4, 7, and 10 out of the 10 week training program.
During those weeks, measure on 4 separate days to calculate a weekly average.
Resonance breathing/HRV training should be done for 20 min twice a day.
Most people see results after 3-4 weeks.
II. Rewiring the Stress Response
Week 1: Finding Your Resonance Frequency
First simple exercise is inhaling for 4 seconds through nose and exhaling for 6 seconds through pursed lips.
This rate of 0.1 Hz, 6 breaths per minute, is the most common resonance frequency.
Counting the seconds also helps since counting and worrying are done by same parts of the brain, and it’s difficult to do both simultaneously.
For even better results, now fine-tune the breathing rate, scanning a range of rates and seeing how they feel. Can supplement this with HRV measurements and seeing which rate had highest HRV.
Having an erect posture can help with performance and wellbeing in general, but is particularly critical for breathing.
Before starting the training, should become clear of your goal for it. Should try and fill in the sentence “I want to… But when I try, … happens.” Or “I wish I could …, but … keeps getting in my way.”
Suggests a “SMARTR” approach to goal setting: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely, and resonant
Good HRV is one of the strongest indicators of good overall heart health and lower risk for cardiac events.
HRV helps lower blood pressure.
Should remind ourselves of our goals before each breathing session.
Week 1 daily practice: Breathe at resonance frequency for 20 min session, twice per day.
Week 2: using Your Break to Increase Energy
[bq] “Most adults breathe absolutely the wrong way - from our chest, not our bellies. The fallout? Relentless stress, sluggish energy levels, emotional dysregulation, a worsening of chronic health conditions, … Poor breathing technique impairs performance in essentially ever area of life.”
Breath should be driven by the diaphragm, but most of us are chest breathers instead of belly breathers.
Rounded upper bodies prevent the diaphragm from doing its job.
For best oxygen absorption we actually need a bit of a CO2 buildup. Best way to achieve this is to slow down the out breath.
Breathing Exercise #3: Belly Breathing. Put one hand on stomach and one hand on chest. Ideally, while breathing the hand on the stomach should move in and out while the one on the bely almost doesn’t move.
Diaphragmatic breathing can help with stress and fear responses.
The more you train belly breathing consciously, the more your body will naturally default to it, especially in stressful moments.
Higher daytime HRV has been linked to better (and faster) sleep at night.
Practicing belly breathing while lying down can feel easier or more comfortable initially. Especially before sleep can be good time for this.
Deep (belly) breathing helps with immunity and inflammation and improves focus.
Week 2 daily practice: For last 5 min of each 20 min session, place one hand on belly and one hadn’t on chest and consciously focus on belly breathing.
Week 3: Letting Go of Your Stress and Expanding Your Emotional Range
When stressed, many people focus on their mind and try to address the issue there. But to really fix the problem, must start from the body.
Traumatic events can get “physiologically stuck”, becoming ingrained as stress in our sympathetic nervous system.
Fixing this at a physical level will allow you to be more intimate and show emotions where previously fear was preventing you.
Step 1: Pick three recurring stressors in your life.
Step 2: Focus on one of them, embrace it, and really become physically aware of how it feels.
[bq] “Breathing Exercise #4: Release Emotion Through Resonance Frequency Breathing”
On the inhale, want to think of the stressor and feel the unpleasant feelings, and then on the exhale let it all go. Teaches the body to experience the uncomfortable feelings but also to let go.
[bq] “Week 3 is when you cultivate the ability to feel deeply and then set those feelings free.”
Besides the regular breathing practice, can also use “Power 10s”: 10 deep breaths of the same form, whenever you actually feel stress (or in anticipation of it).
During this week, might also experience unexpected and sudden emotions like anger or tearing up, without knowing any explicit cause. It’s a sign the body is finally processing unresolved emotional trauma. Calls this “Heart Clearing”.
About 60% of her patients experience a hear learning, usually towards the end of week 3 or 4. It’s almost always a singular event, second ones are very rare. So should fully lean into it and try to make it as deep and full as possible when it happens.
Recommends hydrating well while limiting caffeine for best training results [which I definitely did not do].
Week 3 daily practice: Same two 20 min sessions, but with last 5 min focusing on stressor during inhale, and letting go on exhale.
Week 4: Healing the Broken Parts
Animals can very quickly switch between calm alertness and heightened vigilance. We seem to have unlearned the ability to recover so quickly.
Our advanced emotions might be part of the issue. We can think about a threat long after it’s gone, and as a result the trauma can become part of our physiology.
Often trauma is more imprinted in the body than the mind, and leads to unconscious triggers.
Week 4 is about letting these things go.
[bq] “It’s time to exorcise those repeating themselves and thoughts that gnaw at your heart and mind, your ghosts.”
[bq] “Breathing Exercise #5: Letting Go of Deeply Held Triggers and Beliefs”
Step 1: Other than week 3, go beyond just the daily stressor of everyday life and look for deeper and older stressors. When did you experience lasting disappointment, anger or frustration?
Exampels:
[bq] “How did it feel when you couldn’t obtain your mother’s approval even when trying your best? How did your heart feel when you were teased by classmates?”
Step 2: Really focus on the physical sensations, especially in the heart, of that experience. Ask yourself for a few minutes and then write down as many adjectives as possible.
Step 3: Like in week 3, during inhale try to feel this experience in your heart (rather than thinking about it) and direct it outside during exhale. Add a little bit of pressure to the exhale, like blowing out two or three candles.
[bq] “Breathing Exercise #6: Catching and Releasing Your Ghosts”
Every night, look back at all the day’s stressors in a journal and rate them (or your response to them) on a scale from 1 to 10.
Evaluate it after 3 days.
[bq] “What themes jump out at you Themes of scarcity? Of self-doubt? A sense of time slipping away?”
Especially stressors of 7 or higher might hold clues of ghosts from the past.
For the rest of the week, when another stressor occurs try to breathe it away.
Advice for current week:
[bq] “Don’t worry if this takes you more time to master. We have several weeks ahead to build this skill.”
This week might experience particularly strong Heart Clearings, the body letting go of imprinted trauma. If it involves forgiving someone, calls it “physiological forgiveness.”
Ghost imprints can also manifest in unhealthy behaviors, urges, or cravings. Can also address it with breathing. When you feel craving coming on, use resonance breathing and embrace craving on inhale and let it go on the exhale.
[bq] “Then, like a surfer, ride the craving.”
In week 4, remeasure HRV on four days like in week 1.
Daily practice: In the morning, use last 5 minutes to focus on your “ghosts”. In the evening, use last 5 min to focus on that day’s stressors.
Week 5: Preparing for Challenge
[bq] “Your heart knows how to feel stress and hold on to it. Now you are going to teach it how to feel that stress and automatically let it go."
Calls the technique “Heart Shifting”. 15 breaths at resonance frequency in three sets of 5:
5 to release negative emotions
5 to calm the mind
5 to connect to ideal performance state
[bq] “Breathing Exercise #7: Training Your Heart Rhythms”
Practice before an anticipated stressor.
Step 1: Clear the Heart: 5 breaths, on inhale experience physiological sensations of negative emotions, and let go on exhale.
Step 2: Clear the Mind: For next five breaths, fully focus on the breath itself.
Step 3: Shift the Heart: On inhale for next five breaths, focus on how you want to feel during peak performance. And during exhale let go of any lingering negative emotions or doubt.
Other strategies and tools like music, mantras, and movement can be coupled with resonance breathing to build powerful triggers that can reduce stress in a remarkably short time if practiced well.
These techniques can also be used to address phobias.
With both the positive as well as negative emotions you focus on during this training, the focus should be on their physiological sensations, not cognitively thinking about them as most people are inclined to do.
[bq] “Allow the body to feel the memory first. If your mind starts to take over and tries to conjure up memories of the experience that you have stored in your brain, remind yourself to gently refocus on the heart."
Daily practice for week 5: Last three minutes of each 20 min session practice the heart shifting technique to let go of one of your deeply embedded ghost themes.
Week 6: Mastering the Emotional Pivot
Higher HRV is associated with a greater ability to stay positive in adverse situations.
This week focuses on “Heart Pivoting”, accusing positive emotions at will to fuel resilience.
Step 1: Physiological Recall
Identify at least three very positive experiences in the past and try to recall how they made you feel physically.
Step 2: Increasing Accessibility
Choose one of those positive imprints, and during the inhale of resonance breathing focus on that and let go of stress during exhale.
Step 3: Bridging the Gap
Once this feels comfortable, can try to activate the positive heart imprint in neutral situations, like waiting in line for groceries.
Step 4: Pivoting with the Heart
Try do do the same when you are actually in an adverse situation and feel negative emotions.
Recommends to, additionally to twice daily 20 min practice, also do three “Mini Heart Pivots” of then breaths each throughout the day, ideally each focusing on a different positive imprint.
Research is showing that low HRV is a risk factor for depression.
Daily practice: Same as other weeks but with Heart Pivoting in last 5 min.
Week 7: Cultivating Resonance Under Fire
Chronic stress happens when the sympathetic nervous system gets stuck in an active mode after an acute stress, rather than discharging that energy. Cortisol and adrenaline are constantly elevated.
Goal is not to completely avoid stress, but to “notice the arousal, embrace it, and then let go of it.”
[bq] “Embracing our stress response helps us act on it in a healthier, more productive way.”
Many stressors are quite universal, like time pressure or noise, but also a lot of personal ones.
Should make a list of as many of your stressors as possible.
[bq] “Don’t choose a stressor that is overly upsetting such as a past trauma. This is not a clinical intervention, it’s an optimization strategy to target performance.”
Choose the breathing technique from the previous weeks that feels the most comfortable and powerful to you.
Having chosen a stressor and a breathing technique, can practice “Cultivating Resonance Under Fire”.
For 2 minutes, either imagine or actually expose yourself to the stressor to increase sympathetic activity. Then practice your chose breathing technique (if using in vivo exposure, continue the exposure during this time). Before and after, check in with yourself and rate stress level from 1 to 10. If not at least a 2 point decrease, continue breathing, trying a different technique.
Some additional optimization strategies:
“Game Day Moments”: When you encounter a stressor in everyday life, don’t ignore it but actually use it to pump yourself up, and then try to release it through breathing.
Practice short 5 breath Power Pivots throughout the day
Sleep is the single biggest factor in how we respond to stressors, so need to optimize our sleep as well
“Video-enhanced biofeedback”: While tracking your heart rate, watch a video of yourself in situations where you failed to perform at your peak. Note down exactly which scenes spike your heart rate the most. Then re-watch and just before the trigger moments try if you can reduce your stress response with 3 deliberate breaths
For week 7 daily practice, continue twice daily 20 min resonance breathing and spend final 5 min on Cultivating Resonance Under Fire. Also remeasure HRV during practice this week.
Week 8: Imprinting the Physiology of Success
Visualizations are very powerful and can lead to real physiological changes.
Breathing Exercise #8: Imprinting the Physiology of Success
Step 1: Think of a specific goal you want to achieve over the next month and write it down in as much detail as possible.
Step 2: Try to switch off your outcome-focused mind and see what achieving this goal would make you feel like in your heart. Write down three emotions you’d experience. These are your imprints.
Step 3: Sit with each imprint for a while and really experience what it feels like.
[bq] “The break through comes when you really click into understanding that you can train your heart to feel your future physiological state before you have even achieved your goal.”
It takes practice to really make full use of these imprints, but the eventual benefits can be huge.
[bq] “This exercise is especially useful for managing spikes in anxiety or doubt during the day.”
Music can also have strong impact on us.
Homework assignment: Build a resonance playlist of tracks that help get you into the right state.
Even better: Couple different songs/playlists with different visualizations. That way you have an even stronger trigger for when you want to get into that state.
HRV training particularly useful for performance anxiety.
For week 8 daily practice, continue with 20 min twice daily, and in final 5 min practice Heart Visualization.
Can also try to layer in music now, to help encode the positive feeling even more strongly.
Week 9: Using Your Heart Rhythms to Strengthen Your Relationships
Studies show that people with higher interoceptive ability, an ability to sense ones own internal physiological signals, are also better at reading other people’s emotions.
The ability to accurately estimate your heart rate is an indicator of your interoceptive ability.
Breathing Exercise #9: Estimating Your Heart Rate
Set 30 second timer and count the heart beats without feeling the pulse. Double the number to get HR. Then do the same but feel the pulse to check.
Do some exercise for a few seconds to increase heart rate and repeat above.
Do 2 min of resonance breathing and at the end try to estimate your HR without a timer.
Breathing Exercise #10: Estimating Another Person’s Heart Rate
Commit to doing resonance breathing at least twice weekly for 20 min with a partner. Sit together, maybe even touching, and estimate the other persons heart rate in a similar procedure to exercise #9.
Ask partner to go to a different room and either take calming deep breaths or do exercise to increase HR, then estimate again and see if you could guess which of the two they did.
Breathing Exercise #11: Interpersonal Synchronization Training
With your partner, once a week practice together at your resonance frequency, the other time at the partner’s resonance frequency.
When you’re in a heated argument and struggle with emotional regulation, taking a 20 min break to calm and lower your heart rate and physiological arousal can often diffuse the conflict. Also, exercise can have the same effect or even stronger, getting us out of a hyper-vigilant state.
If you realize your HR is more than 20 beats above your baseline in any non-exercise situation, it’s probably good to use either 20 min of rest or exercise to reset.
Eye contact and a soft, higher-pitched voice with variation helps put another person at ease, and reduce their fight or flight response. Touch also stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system in a soothing way.
[bq] “Research confirms that people with higher HRV have sex more frequently. Not only that - it’s better sex."
For week 9 daily practice, continue as before and use last 5 min of each session to practice interoceptive abilities via exercise #9 if working alone, or #10 if breathing with a partner.
Week 10: Anchoring Yourself in Resonance
Everyone has people or situations that drain our energy and get us our of resonance. This week is about staying in resonance in the face of such detractors.
Empaths and highly sensitive people are particularly affected by negative moods around them.
Stress and lack of sleep also make you more susceptible to negative emotions.
Breathing Exercise #12: The Bubble
Step 1: Visualize a bubble slowly wrapping around you, starting at your right foot, going all the way up to your right ear, and then down the left side to complete the bubble around you.
Step 2: Focus on your heart and the love and safety you feel in the bubble.
Step 3: On inhale, focus on the negativity in your body: stress, tension, anxiety,… On exhale, push it out of your body and out of the bubble.
Step 4: Return to feeling of love and safety.
Resonance breathing can also help with panic attacks.
For week 10 daily practice, use the last 5 min of each session to practice the bubble. Also re-measure HRV this week.
III. Beyond 10 Weeks
14. Maintaining and Fueling Your Resonance
To keep the cognitive benefits, most people feel like they need to keep the twice-daily practice for at least 5 days per week.
Cold exposure and high intensity interval training both great for further increasing HRV.
Doing group HRV training with professional teams can greatly enhance the alignment of the members, and as a result the performance of the team.
Resonance breathing leads to larger fluctuations in blood vessel diameters, which results in improved oxygenation of the brain.
[bq] “With a new and deep understanding of heart rate variability, you now possess a systematic, time-oriented, physiology-first approach for tapping into a performance oriented state. […] You’ve done something incredible: you have optimized your nervous system for peak performance."