Ep 151 Watch Your Breath, Not Your Tracker: What HRV Really Means in Midlife

Does your fitness tracker tell you off? Poor recovery again. Stress high again. HRV dropped again, even though you're doing all the things.

If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you. Carly explains what heart rate variability actually is, why it's a measure of your adaptability rather than your calm, and what genuinely happens to it in perimenopause and menopause. Because your watch may well be picking up something real, it just has no idea that you had a hot flush at two in the morning.

There's a lovely bit of physiology, ans a look at what the research does and doesn't say, a story from Carly's Olympic weightlifting days, and a short guided coherence breathing practice you can do right along with the episode.

Your watch isn't necessarily broken. And neither are you.

Curious to see what connecting with your breath can do to support your midlife wellness? Learn more about the Breathwork Pathfinder session here >> Breathwork 1-1 with Carly

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Transcript

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0:47

Hello, and welcome back to Rooted in Presence. I'm Carly, your curious midlife guide and founder of Still Space Hull. And here we are at episode 151. So let's start this week with a question. Do you wear a watch or a ring or some kind of tracker that tells you about your recovery, your readiness, your stress levels, all those fitness tracker type things? And, uh, if you do, I am curious, do you feel like it tells you off? Maybe more so in the last few years, 'cause there's something I've been hearing a lot that I wanted to bring today. A lot of women in midlife looking at their wrist in the morning and seeing that their recovery is poor again, their stress is high, their heart rate variability's dropped once again, even though they're doing all the things. And then drawing the conclusion, which feels obvious, that there must be something wrong, must be doing something wrong. That maybe they're not resting properly, that they're failing at the one thing that they constantly get told that would help. So today, I want to talk to you about heart rate variability, what it actually is, what it genuinely tells you, what happens to it in midlife, and why the story your watch is telling you might not be the one you think. And I promise you, it's more interesting and a lot kinder than a lecture about numbers And I'll be honest about where this came from. I've just done a viva for my breathwork teacher training, and one of the questions I was asked about was what is heart rate variability, what it is, what breathwork has to do with it, and how we might influence it. And I hunted it on the spot, which is slightly terrifying way to talk about physiology. So afterwards, I went and double-checked my facts properly, which turned out to be a good thing Because when I was checking, I found something about menopause and HRV that I think a lot of you will find very useful. So let's start from the beginning because easy to get muddled with these things, a lot of messages out there. Heart rate variability is not actually your heart rate. Your heart rate is how many times your heart beats in a minute. Heart rate variability is something else entirely. It's the variation in the time between one heartbeat and the next. So if your heart is beating at, for example, 60 beats per minute, it's not beating like a metronome exactly one second apart every time. There are tiny little differences, the gap slightly longer or slightly shorter between one heartbeat and the next, and it's the size and the pattern of those tiny differences is what is actually being measured to create this HRV, uh, number. Now, here's where it gets a little bit surprising. Those differences are actually a good thing. is generally healthier than less variability. So how's that for that consistency message? So a heart that beats like this perfect metronome is not a very well-regulated heart, it's a rigid one. So this is where your breath comes into it, and I really like this little fact. Your heart rate naturally speeds up a little as you breathe in, as you inhale, and it slows down a little as you breathe out. And that's a real measurable thing. When you inhale, the vagal brake eases off slightly and your heart can quicken. When you exhale, the vagus nerve's influence returns and your heart slows down. In is faster, out slower, all day, every day, maybe without you even noticing. Which means your breathing is one of the most direct, accessible influences you have on this whole system, and that can become very useful in many moments in your life but something I really do want you to take away, um, and something that I said in my V for exam, and it's the thing I think most people get wrong about HRV. It's not a measure of how calm you are. It's a measure of how adaptable you are because we are not meant to stay in one state all the time. You're not supposed to be permanently alert, and you're not supposed to be permanently calm either because both of those are a system stuck at one end of a scale or a spectrum. But what a healthy nervous system actually does is move. It rises to meet what life is asking, and then it comes back down to baseline afterwards. And HRV is essentially a measure of how well and how readily you can do that, how easily you can shift states and return home. So if you listen to the episode 146, this will sound a little bit familiar, because it's exactly the same principle. We don't just need more calm, it's more range that is helpful. So HRV is, in a sense, a number that reflects your range. So a low reading isn't telling you that you're bad at relaxing, it's telling you that right now your system maybe has less room to move than usual. And that's a completely different message, isn't it? It's information, it's not some report card or pass or fail. So let's talk about midlife. This is the part I went and looked up properly because I'd heard bits, but I needed to really check. And it actually makes a big difference if you are in perimenopause or menopause and wearing a tracker and using this to inform how you live your life. There is a real body of research showing that HRV tends to be lower in postmenopausal women compared to those in their premenopausal years. As estrogen declines, there is a shift in the balance of your autonomic nervous system with a tendency towards more sympathetic dominance. So what we mean is you're a little bit more likely to have those stress responses. Maybe you might be familiar with that. So the reading you're seeing might well be genuinely lower than it used to be if you had old recordings. Although I feel like we need to add a caveat here because it, in at least one study, those baseline differences weren't statistically significant once we accounted for age, body mass index were accounted for. So age itself is part of the picture as well. Science is very rarely as tidy as we'd like it to be. So there's also research showing that HRV tends to be lower in women experiencing moderate to intense menopausal symptoms compared to those with mild ones. And this is a really interesting detail I found I thought might be most useful for you. There's work looking at what happens during hot flushes, including those that occur during sleep, showing this vagal withdrawal during these events, which in plain English means a hot flush in the night is a physiological event that shifts your autonomic state, whether or not it fully wakes you up. And in even plainer language, it disturbs your sleep whether you know about it or not. So that waking up groggy feeling like you haven't had a good rest could be well-founded. So the bit I really want you to hear though is that if your tracker has been telling you all year that your recovery is poor, your stress is high, and you've been lying there at 3:00 in the morning throwing the duvet off, those things are all connected. Your watch is not necessarily broken, but more importantly, neither are you. It might be picking up something very real and, the watch isn't really there to tell you why. Because your device will see a low number and report stress or poor recovery, could be some truth in that, but it has no idea whether that's because you had a hard week at work, a glass of wine, or because your body was doing something entirely hormonal at 2:00 in the morning, and it's important to understand that difference. You could be doing everything right. I say that in little quotation marks there. You could be resting well, as well as you can, training sensibly, and still see a number that you might interpret as failing. That's not a personal failing, that's how the physiology and the tracker are interacting with each other, and it definitely deserves a lot more compassion than a number on the screen. So I'll tell you that when I first started paying attention to this myself, because it wasn't particularly wellness reasons per se, it was when I was competing in Olympic weightlifting at masters level, which I always feel I should clarify, not actual Olympics. But I started tracking my HRV for this very practical reason. I wanted to know whether I was actually recovering, because in strength training, the rest matters as much as the lifting does, and I knew that, but I wanted to see it. I wanted to optimize it, improve my chances on the competition platform. And this mattered most in the week before a competition with what I would call a peak week, where you deliberately do a lot less. You still lift the heavy weights, but a lot less reps, and you mostly rest. And I found that really difficult, because when I did less exercise, my ADHD symptoms would often ramp up, and I'd get really restless, and my activity would creep up without me meaning to, which kind of defeats the object of a rest week, but that's a whole other challenge. So I decided I would use HRV as a sort of second opinion. Was how I felt on the inside actually matching what was being recorded? Sometimes it was, and sometimes it wasn't, and they were both interesting bits of data to collect And the fact that I could look at it a bit more objectively, I think is actually really p- important because there's something here that I feel really quite strongly about, and maybe hold this from both sides. I don't think it's a simple one-and-done explanation or thought. But these devices, you know, our trackers and things, they can be very useful. I'm not anti-tracker at all. They can be a wonderful companion while you learn about how your body functions, and if you are someone who has been quite disconnected from your body, if you're not in the habit of noticing your internal world at all, then yeah, a tracker can be a brilliant doorway in. It can be a brilliant way to keep noticing your steps, your habits, how different ways of living impact you. It can give you a prompt to check in, and it gets you asking the question, "How am I doing?" And that's a real gift, and I would never dismiss that. I believe there needs to be a bit more nuance to this. Because they are there to accompany your learning, not to replace it. The goal isn't to become excellent at reading a watch. The goal is to become excellent at reading yourself, to build up that internal sense or what we would call interoception, so that eventually you know what you need without having to ask a screen for permission. So by all means, use it as a conversation, not some verdict on your performance. Notice what it says, and then notice what you feel. Pay attention to where those two things agree and where they don't Because the aim really is to end up trusting yourself with the data as a helpful friend alongside, rather than handing all of your authority or power over to a number that doesn't know that you had a hot flush at 2:00 in the morning So what can you actually do about this? Now, of course, I have a practical bit for you because, well, I do promise you these things and that there would be something that you could actually do. And this is where the breath comes back in. Remember what I said at the start. Your heart speeds up slightly on the inhale and slows slightly on the exhale. That means the way we breathe directly shapes your rhythm. And there is a particular pace of breathing where the effect becomes a lot more pronounced, where it allows your body, mind, To line up really beautifully. And we'll sometimes hear this called coherence breathing or resonance breathing or heart rate variability breathing, and it's often quoted as sitting at around the five to six breaths per minute. So for a lot of people, maybe that's 5.5. So the exact sweet spot is highly individual. Again, this is going off the studies, and if you weren't in the study, then it probably doesn't apply directly to you, which probably won't surprise you if you've listened to me for any length of time It's all about just remembering your own self in this. And something that we need to note as well is that sometimes the five to six breaths per minute can feel a little bit slow, so please don't feel like you have to go straight into this rate, especially if you are living life at 18 breaths per minute. I wouldn't exactly ask you to drop that down to a third all of a sudden. So this is something that can be worked on. And again, it's not a special goal to get to. There's no badges for this, just you getting to know yourself, your breath and the benefits that get to come along with that So in practice, you might want to use something like a count of four on your inhale and a count of four on your exhale, and there might be a small natural pause, and over time you might find that you start to join up those pauses and one breath starts to flow into the other. You might also find for you that it's a count of three or a count of five, and this is all fine. It's about you finding your own rhythm rather than hitting a number. So perhaps we might like to do a few breaths together now if you're somewhere safe to concentrate on this. Coherence breathing can absolutely be done everywhere, but if it's new to you, probably not a good idea to focus on it when you're driving for the very first time. So Wherever you are, maybe you can just let your body settle a little bit. Whether that's still or whether you're pottering, it's actually fine. If you want to close your eyes, you can do if that's comfortable, or soften your gaze. But whatever you're doing, maybe just put it down just for a moment to give your breath the focus for the next minute or so. So just allowing your next exhale to happen. Waiting there for a second, and then we breathe in for the count of four. Two, three, four. And exhale, two, three, four. Inhale, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four. Inhale Exhale. And maybe just continue a few breaths, finding your own rhythm and your own counts And just continuing the breath at your own pace. Maybe keeping count in your head or on your fingers. my favorite part about this kind of breathing is the counting is a really useful place to start. Gives you something to hold onto, but you can also let it go So perhaps let the counting drop away and just watch your breath instead Notice the little pause where the exhale ends and the inhale begins And the place where the inhale turns and becomes the exhale Those turning points, those connections And what you might find if you simply pay attention there without managing it, is that your breath naturally settles into its own equilibrium The in and the out might become the same length all by themselves without you counting at all And that's your own rhythm finding itself. And personally, that's how I love to do this. Not counting my way to coherence, but paying enough attention that coherence arrives all by itself And if you'd like to release that breath pattern now and return to your usual way of breathing, you're absolutely welcome to continue that rhythm for as long as it suits you. And just a few minutes of that can really shift things. It's free, it's available anywhere, and nobody around you needs to know that you're doing it So if you take one thing from today, maybe let it be this. Your HRV is not a calm score. It is a measure of your adaptability. It's showing you how much room your system currently has to move., And in midlife with hormones shifting and sleep being interrupted in ways that are very real, a lower number very often means your body is dealing with something genuine and you are not failing at rest. So be curious about the data, but don't be governed by it, and know that your breath is one of the most direct and one of the kindest ways you have of influencing this And if today's few breaths gave you a taste of something and you'd like to explore what breathwork could actually do for you, this is exactly what my Pathfinder session is for. It's a 90-minute one-to-one breathwork exploration where we spend some proper time connecting with the breath. I'll guide you through a breathwork practice, and we'll explore together which breaths really feel good for you. Because as you've heard me say many times, this is deeply individual And it's a chance to begin building a real relationship with your breath and to work out how you might use it in your actual life. And we can do that in person at Still Space Hull or online. And yeah, online works beautifully for this as well. Sometimes it's even better because you don't have to go anywhere afterwards. Anyway, you'll find the details on the website stillspacehull.com, and those details are in the show notes. So that's it for this week, and until next time, may you meet yourself with compassion, walk with presence and remember you already have everything you need