What is Heart Coherence & Why it is Important for Your Wellbeing?

Intelligence of the Heart

There is a beautiful intelligence held within the heart. If we take the time to listen and tune inwards, we can access this powerful intuitive inner guidance and wisdom from the heart space.

Over the last 40 years researchers have been learning and revealing the powerful wisdom of our hearts. The heart has an electromagnetic field that is 100x stronger than that of the brain.  Our thoughts and emotions can affect the heart’s magnetic field, which can affect our surrounding environment whether we are aware of it or not. This electromagnetic field can emanate out from the body as far as 3-4 feet.

What is Coherence? How Your Emotion’s Impact Coherence?

Coherence is the optimal state in which the heart, mind and emotions are all in sync and balanced with one another. The HeartMath Institute researchers have examined heart rate patterns through electrocardiogram (ECG) for coherence. Coherent patterns were seen with the heartbeat when positive emotions like appreciation, love, and care were felt. Depleting emotions like frustration, irritation, anxiety or worry caused incoherent patterns and disorganized heartbeat patterns. This is fascinating research that shows the power in which our emotions can affect our heart rate patterns.

Heart Coherence Benefits

When the heart-rhythm is in a state of coherence, the optimal state, then the mind, body, emotions and heart are all in sync and balanced with one another. When the heart and body are in a coherent state then there is minimal energy drain and energy waste that happens within our body’s systems. Your heart rhythms, the respiratory system, blood pressure rhythms, immune system, and hormones can all begin performing optimally and in a synchronized way.  

The heart can influence brain activity through the nervous system pathways. When heartbeats are in a more coherent state then your brain function is more optimal. The heart has its own complex nervous system and can send far more information to the brain than vice versa. Heart rhythms will affect the brain centres involved in decision making, focus, memory, ability to learn, reaction times, social awareness and ability to self-regulate. Therefore, coherence of the heart will create coherence in having optimal physical and mental brain performance.  

The Impact of Stress of the Heart and Nervous System

In today’s world, many of us experience the challenges of dealing with emotions in work and our personal lives. We are used to being non-stop on the go, working long hours, multi-tasking and being constantly bombarded with information all day long.

When our bodies are stressed, constantly living in a sympathetic nervous system state, over time this degrades our health (mind, body and spirit) and our ability to self-regulate our emotions and behaviours. Overtime, your body can become wired to have a stressed-out nervous system as your baseline for how you have learned to cope and live in your body. When your body is stressed out, then your body is likely living in a state of incoherence. To move towards a state of health, bringing the body into a state of harmony, balance and coherence is key.

When working towards moving into a state of coherence in the heart, brain and body it may feel uncomfortable and unknown in the beginning. The body is very smart and will seek out comfort and what is familiar even if it isn’t healthy or advantageous. The body will keep you in a familiar pattern of what you are used to and what it knows best. Moving into a healthy state of coherence takes time and consistency to re-establish a healthier baseline. We need to train our nervous system to have a new normal and reset old patterns.

Our nervous system may be constantly in a state of “fight or flight” as a way of keeping the body safe, even when it’s not advantageous for our health. We can begin picking up these nervous system patterns in childhood, and these patterns can be carried with us later on in life. The body is smart at remember and does what it can to keep us safe. For example, if you grew up walking on eggshells around a parent who would have anger outbursts, slam the door or raise their voice -that can send a child’s nervous system into a “fight or flight” state. The body can remember these patterns to help us adapt and cope with the chaos and stress happening around them. The child’s nervous system can learn to always be on high alert or in a state of hyper-vigilance, which becomes their nervous system’s normal baseline years later. It takes time and consistent practice to retrain our nervous system to be in a state of peace and relaxation.

Benefits of Heart Coherence

Coherence can create many positive outcomes like improving relationships, the ability to self-regulate through challenging times, reduces fatigue, promotes the body’s ability to heal, improved reaction times, better thinking and memory, and more open to listening to your intuition. Being able to transform stress and how we emotionally respond to a stressful event can help us to be more resilient and better regulated emotionally, physically and mentally.

Uplifting emotions like love, gratitude and appreciation can lead us to an increase in longevity, increased memory, problem solving skills, intuition, creativity and resilience to adversity.   

Depleting emotions like fear, frustration, impatience, anger can all release our stress hormone cortisol. Overtime the repetitive release of cortisol hormone by holding onto an emotionally depleting situation or event that happened can reduce muscle mass, impair memory, accelerate aging, impair mental function and cause brain cell degradation.

If you’re stuck in maladaptive patterns of persistent anxiety, frustration, and/or depression know that you can reset your pattern/baseline and rewire your neurological network in the brain and heart. This will help with emotional regulation in the long term. Being able to establish a new baseline can take time, patience, consistency and the ability to walk through the discomfort and resistance that may present itself. 

Self-awareness is key to be accountable to yourself on whether you are draining your energy with depleting emotions or lifting up your energy with positive emotions.

How to Practice Heart Coherence

Breathing and spending time in your heart centre is a beneficial technique for training the body to move into a state of heart coherence.

1. Focus your attention on your heart centre. You can do this with your eyes open or closed.
2. Take slower and deeper breaths than usual.
3. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart centre.
4. Inhale count of 5 and exhale count of 5
5. Repeat this cycle of breath for another 2-3 minutes. Set a timer on your phone and begin slow and deep breathing in and out of your heart centre.
6. Lastly, end this practice by naming 3 things you are grateful for. Feel the emotion of gratitude in your heart space, focusing your energy here. Namaste.

References 

https://www.heartmath.com/science/

https://www.heartmath.com/blog/stress-anxiety/

https://www.heartmath.org/assets/uploads/2015/01/coherence-bridging-personal-social-global-health.pdf