HeartMath: The Science of HRV with Dr. Deborah Rozman

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2:31I'm Maura Ahrens-Mele and this is the Anxious Achiever. Heart rate variability, HRV, your vagus nerve, your parasympathetic and your sympathetic nervous system. These are all words that we are all hearing a lot recently, especially in the context of performance and well-being at work. And today, Dr. Deborah Rosman, who is the co-CEO and president of HeartMath, is here to explain the heart, mind, nervous system connection, what heart rate variability is, and how we can achieve coherence in our heart rate variability. which she says leads to a flow state where we are both fully present with energy and focus but very important for my anxious achievers not in a swirl not in a threat state this is a really great conversation both if you're curious about the physiology and foundations behind all this stuff if like me you have an aura ring that's always telling you that your heart rate variability is maybe not where it should be.

3:49But she also offers some really simple exercises to get your heart into coherence. And one of the ones that we do together is a simple gratitude practice. I have to tell you that for me, a gratitude practice, I do it multiple times a day. And that sounds fancy, a gratitude practice. I simply pause, come to the present moment. I'll often and try to get my breathing or try to relax my muscles, or as Dr. Rosman shows us, manage breathing into my heart and think of things that I'm grateful for. It's this very simple practice that can really give you a reset, especially when your mood, like mine, can tend to a little bit depressed and anxious even on a good day.

4:40It's really important, I think, for all of us to have a basic understanding of this stuff, but also the knowledge and power to know that we can change our days through these practices. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Deborah Rosman.

4:58Dr. Deborah Rosman, welcome. I'm super excited. As I said, as we were getting ready, I'm excited to learn today. So I'm glad you're here. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. Well, so I would assume that my listeners have varying rates of knowledge and engagement on the topics most relevant to your work. But let's just zoom out for a sec. Today we're going to talk about nervous system regulation. We're going to talk about understanding heart rate variability. We're going to talk about heart math. But the big question to me is, why is it so important for anybody who has an engaging career that is sometimes stressful to understand the basics of their nervous system?

5:53Oh, that's a great question. the autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, how they interact regulates 90 % of our body's involuntary functions, sleep, digestion, elimination, hormones, immune system, and more. And that is so important to understand because those imbalances in those areas are symptoms, but they're symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system. And what causes dysregulation in the nervous system is several things, but what we focus on is lack of emotional management, accumulated stress, and the inability to release stress throughout your nervous system and body as you go through life.

6:50That can create anxiety disorders, depression, and all the mental health issues, as well as these physical symptoms and hypertension. So what we've done at HeartMath is really looked at how the heart, which I'll explain why that's important, brain and nervous system communicate. Because if we can get them in sync and aligned, we really create more optimal performance, higher brain functions. When they're out of sync, which is true for most of us most of the time because no one's ever taught us how to manage and regulate our emotions, let alone our nervous system, and those are truly linked. So another question, big question is, our nervous system is ancient.

7:44And to me, I'm sure you understand a lot, but there's sort of a beautiful mystery to me about it. Emotions are not physical necessarily, or at least we're not taught that they're physical. What is the relationship between our emotions and our nervous system? How do they work together? Great question. Well, that's where heart rate variability analysis gave us the window into that link. And that link was first published based on our research in the American Journal of Cardiology in 1995. And it's the first time anyone's looked at and been able to research the link between our emotional state and our autonomic nervous system, or our heart rate variability pattern, our heart rhythms.

8:36Now, why that's so important is because once we have the window, we can see better how to regulate and develop techniques, tools, methods, technologies to help us get in sync. And that's what HeartMats has spent the last 30 years doing. So when we are stressed, frustrated, anxious, worried, impatient, irritable, from a scale of just minor irritability to strong anger, those are stressful emotions that create a stress response in the nervous system and in the body. and where you can see it first is in the heart rate variability pattern. Now, so many wearables have now incorporated heart rate variability.

9:25Can you just find heart rate variability real quick just while we're getting started here? I was going to. So our heart rate is not static like 50 beats per minute or 65 or whatever your heart rate monitor shows. That's an average over a minute. the heart rate is actually changing with every single heartbeat so you could be 40 beats per minute 60 beats per minute 30 beats per minute 70 beats per minute and if you plot that heart rate change over a minute you get an average but it's the pattern of that heart rate change why it's called variability, that reflects our emotional state. That's what was published in the American Journal of Cardiology.

10:13That was like a wow. And it is so sensitive. It is so responsive that it blew my mind when I first saw it. So if I'm feeling a little out of sorts, which we all do at times, or irritable or impatient, I see this herky-jerky pattern in the pattern of if I'm feeling really angry or anxious or some strong stress emotion, that pattern is so jagged it just looks chaotic. And it is called an incoherent waveform. But that's sympathetic and parasympathetic systems fighting each other, you know, speeding up, slowing down, speeding up, slowing down. It's like driving your car with one foot on the brake and one foot on the accelerator.

11:00You end up having a really herky-jerky ride, right? And so what's really also blew my mind was when you're feeling calm, loving, grateful, appreciative, the feelings that are heartfelt, uplifting emotions, that hrv pattern looks like rolling hills smooth silky and that's like a sine wave and in physics that's called a coherent waveform so we call that part rhythm coherence because the rhythm is nice and it's a flow and you feel inside like a flow it's so reflective of what you're feeling that it makes you more aware of whatever it is going on inside. Because why that's so important is that the heart contains its own little brain or intrinsic nervous system.

11:59And this was only discovered in the 1990s, not by us, but by Dr. J. Andrew Armour of Dalhousie University. And he's a neurocardiologist and analyzed and was able to see there's 40 ,000 sensory neurons there that sense, feel, learn, remember. and operate independently of the head brain. So the heart has actually got a role, besides a blood pressure wave, sending information about how the body feels through the vagal nerve to two brain centers. And one of them is the thalamus, which synchronizes cortical function. So if that incoherent, stressful emotion waveform goes there, the thalamus goes, okay, survival mode, fight, flight, fright, And then it directs the heart rate to speed up and it creates a lot of cortisol and different stress hormones and directs the autonomic nervous system, which is what heart rate variability is measuring, to go into protective mode.

13:01So we end up with immune responses, all the symptoms, and we can end up in that pattern that's anxiety. and that HRV pattern, we can see what anxiety looks like, is then sent to the amygdala, the other brain center that stores emotional memory and it can develop an anxiety habit. It goes, oh, looks for what's familiar. Oh, I know that one, trigger anxiety and all the protective mechanisms that go with that. But the real opportunity here, as well as the window, is when you switch to that coherent heart rhythm. And we develop techniques so people can do it in a minute and power up, leg up their emotional management.

13:52That synchronizes the vagal nerve traffic of coherence, synchronizes cortical function, and helps create cortical facilitation all the way to the frontal lobes, our executive decision-making center, our sense of bigger picture thinking, our ability to feel compassion or empathy, and for executives like myself, our intuitive discernment and guidance. It's very powerful to change that heart rhythm into a coherent waveform. So how is this different than, you know, I was raised as a young athlete to always be checking my resting heart rate and then my pulse after I was getting my heart rate up. We still do, right?

14:40We wear my aura ring on. We're checking our resting heart rate and then we're checking our elevated heart rate to determine fitness. how is that model different from the model of heart rate variability and driving a nervous system response great question so just a little story first sure when we were first looking at heart rate variability and looking at the pattern over time we also looked at volume amount of heart rate variability, which reflects health status and recovery status. And the doctor, the scientist who coined the name heart rate variability, it started in fetal monitors, became part of our scientific advisory board, Dr.

15:28Donald Singer, because he had never really analyzed the pattern over time. Think of that's the x-axis, whereas heart rate variability on your aura ring and other variables, wearables are doing the y-axis because that's important for athletics, for recovery. To know what your actual heart rate is doing up and down. Yes, it is exactly because you want the most variability to have the most resilience and recovery. Babies are born with huge HRV and we have a natural age-related decline and it reflects our emotional flexibility too. It's all the way we're designed but why it's so important as an athlete or a performer or an executive or anyone anyone yeah who wants to let anyone why it's so important to look at the pattern is because that determines how much we're in sync or in a flow state and like we started off with one of our first technologies being adopted by golfers, by golf pros, by golf, because if you can get into coherence before you take a shot, your drive is longer, your yips go away.

16:45I mean, it's just regulating the nervous system and giving you more optimal performance. So we worked with all four branches of the U.S. military before we really launched into the consumer market because they wanted to be able to regulate really quickly when they had a reaction or a law enforcement. When there's domestic violence issues, the heart rate goes up in police like that, but you have to be able to bring it down and go back to emotional balance when you're triggered. So that's super important for sports and team sports, getting in the zone with each other. Coherence is the first level of zone training.

17:23So I could go on and on about high performance. I mean, I think what's so amazing and what probably a generation is both excited about and confused about is weight. So my emotions are connected to my autonomic nervous system, which is connected to my heart function, which is connected to hormonal responses, you know, and really trying to conceptualize that. in a way that you have that working model as a high performer out there every single day. Absolutely. And it's not such a mystery when you realize the heart has its own intrinsic nervous system independent of the brain and it is regulating.

18:11It is the autonomic nervous system, sympathetic, parasympathetic. That's how heart rate is measured and heart rate variability. That is what it is. And the fact that there's more traffic, neural traffic, going from the heart to the brain, 90 % of it is afferent, than going from the brain back to the heart. And yet, we were all taught. 100%. The brain controls the heart. 100%. It's upside down. It's two-way. But looking at it from the heart, the lens of the heart and its functions, The heart's communicating with the brain through four modalities, a radio wave of how we feel. That's like a radio transmitter, a receiver.

18:59We pick up each other's vibes through the electromagnetic field of the heart. It's putting out each beat 2.5 watts of power. And we are transmitting our emotional state with those beats to every cell of our body that affects health, to our brain, which affects cortical function, and to each other. And so there's the blood pressure wave. We all know about that one. But we don't know next about this nervous system transfer, which is what I'm focusing on right now, because that's what we can most easily regulate. And emotion, how we feel, is the driver of so much of that. I have a new driver in my family.

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24:26Okay, it imprints that. And to your thalamus, which goes, stress, let's go into fight, flight, fright, whichever one's your habitual mode, and you shut down or you vent. And, you know, those are the typical responses. and then the autonomic nervous system says, okay, this disruption has disrupted my circadian rhythm, my cortisol rhythm. I end up having high cortisol. It affects my thinking. I have brain fog and I have disrupted sleep at night. Okay, and five minutes, we did this research in the lab, it's been published, of just even rehashing an angry event. I don't even say in real time. depresses the immune system for six hours.

25:14That's why we need to pay attention. But the good news is you don't want to repress that anger. You don't want to vent it. You want to bring it back to autonomic balance. That way, a different signal is going to your brain that can see more appropriate responses. And all this happens very quickly. But how you bring it back is a very simple, quick coherence technique that we finally developed from all this complexity. And people do it naturally at times. You have to focus your attention in the area of the heart and pretend like your breath is flowing in and out of this heart or chest area to about a 10-second rhythm in through the area of the heart and out through the area of the heart.

26:02In fact, we can try it together right now. Let's do it, yeah. Let's do it. Okay, focus in the heart. You can put your hand in your heart if it helps you keep your attention down there instead of up here. And then breathe in through the area of the heart and out. Just imagine your breath flowing in and out there. Maybe to a count of five or six. Find an easy rhythm that's comfortable and then forget about counting.

26:32Now you should continue this heart-focused breathing. just activate an attitude of calm or ease as you're breathing or if you can feel grateful for someone or something in your life like your pet or a loved one or a time in nature just breathe that feeling or that attitude in through the area of the heart and then out through the area of the heart

27:08and that is quick coherence. How do you feel, Maura? Calm. Calm. If I had you hooked up with our sensor, heart rate variability, coherence sensor to the interbalance app or the heart rate, you would have seen your heart rhythms go from the resting state of semi-incoherence, natural to that coherent waveform. That is so confirming that we need to be doing that little technique several times during the day. Whenever we get triggered, whenever we find ourselves rehashing something, whenever we start to feel tense or anxious, you do that, you're bringing yourself back to nervous system balance, autonomic balance.

27:58It's not just a nice sweet thing to do. It's a powerful transformer of your nervous system energy. What happens with stress if you don't manage it or release it or transform it like this way or some other way, exercise or let it go, is it accumulates. It accumulates that incoherent energy in your nervous system and accumulates that dysregulation throughout your immune and hormonal system and all the whole thing the autonomic nervous system controls, digestion, elimination, the list. when you can reset or reboot as we call it several times a day either before you're going into that challenging argument situation that could have an argument or afterwards when you're already been triggered you want to reboot reset so you're not draining your energy and you're keeping your channel your connection with your higher brain and higher performance stayed flowing so you can move through your life on the go with more appropriate responses, more intelligence.

29:09We actually call it heart intelligence because you're actually opening up that whole heart-brain synchronization alignment system, which allows you to move through life with more grace, poise, ease, flow. On those perfect flow days that we have occasionally, you can have more of those as you practice nervous system balance. I've had colleagues who have recommended breathing into your heart as an alternative. I mean, obviously anyone who's done any level of mindfulness or grounding work will know the power of breath, but breath is hard for some of us, especially if you're anxious. It's hard. So I've had colleagues recommend the practice of breathing into your heart instead of trying to get that deep belly breath.

30:00Exactly. That breathing into your heart, the physiology of that, is that it starts to direct interact with the autonomic nervous system. If you breathe into your heart at that 10-second rhythm, it activates the parasympathetic response, the relaxation response. But coherence isn't just relaxation. What's really cool is that it's relaxed but present. As an executive, I don't just want my managers in a meeting just to be relaxed. I want them present and all their brain and heart functions. And that's what coherence provides. You know, we get into heart coherence at HeartMath, and we teach organizations, inner quality management training programs, resilience building programs.

30:52We teach how to get in coherence before meetings. It cuts meeting times in half because it just clarifies and gets right to the point and gets the egos out of the way because people are centered. And that's what you want. You want to prep and be your best self. And breathing through the heart starts to give you the foundation to do that and then activating as you breathe. a heart-based attitude. What's that? It doesn't matter if it's care, kindness, love, appreciation, calmness, ease. All of those create coherence in the heart rhythms and allow it to be sustained so you can forget about your breath.

31:35If you can do the heart-focused breathing and then activate appreciation for your co-workers or a project you're working on or something you love that brings those rhythms into coherence, it creates sympathetic activation as well as parasympathetic. They entrain, and you can see the power spectrum on our inner balance app, and that gives much more power to align the brain and you move more in a flow state. That's why we work all major league baseball teams. Their coaches use our technology and help people get into coherence before they play? So it's funny. I mean, I think in my world, you know, I work with a lot of high performers who use anxiety as a motivating tool, use stress, being stressed as a motivating tool.

32:38And, you know, it can be very effective, right? It can be very effective, especially in short doses. That's the key. The short doses creates a challenge that you want to go for. And we all want that. But what happens is we live in a society where it's constant stress, stress, stress. And we don't, especially not just when you're trying to do high performance, but we're reacting to every little thing. We watch the news and we get all stressed out. That's a different kind of stress. That's what I'm talking about that we have to really begin to address because it drains our energy and it drains high performance states.

33:18So what would your advice be for someone, you know, you mentioned major league baseball pitchers. You know, I've interviewed a lot of athletes who have said, well, I like, I like feeling nervous before a game. It focuses me, It gets my body ready to go. Like if I weren't nervous, if I weren't a little bit anxious, I wouldn't have that activation energy that I need. Yeah. You know, two things I would say in response. One is you don't stay nervous. It's what you have to activate you and then you give it your name. Right. It's all about the short, the motivation factor. And then you love your game or you wouldn't keep playing it.

33:59So you're actually moving from that nervousness to your best game, to your flow state, to your presence. And that's getting you more into that coherence. You can be in HRV coherence at a low heart rate or a very high heart rate. It is not dependent on heart rate. It's the pattern of change. It's the variability that we're looking at. And that's something for people to grok because they don't really know that. They go, okay, my HRV is this, and I get a number on my aura ring or my whoop, but what does it mean and how do I improve it? Well, that's where heart mouth comes in. You have to regulate the nervous system and get into heart coherence.

34:45As you practice that, it accumulates like stress accumulates. Resilience is an energy that accumulates, and that increases the number. So you want high heart rate variability? Yes. Why? But not low high heart rate. It's different. Heart rate can be 90 beats per minute or 100 beats per minute, but that could be, the variability could be 80 to 130 to 90 to, and it averages at 100. But that pattern could be herky-jerky, that 80 to 100 at 100, and that's the pattern. whereas if a high heart rate it goes from 80 to 120 80 to 120 80 to 120 and averages at 100 that's coherence and that's the flow state that's why you want it you don't you want and the heart rate variability now you want volume the reason you want it to be high peaks and troughs, low troughs in that pattern of coherence is because that reflects your ability to be resilient.

35:59Like you're out relaxed and then all of a sudden an avalanche comes. You want to be able to get up and run. You want to be able to bring it right back down for that calm and balance. That's what high heart rate variability provides. Like I said, children have the highest. They can be happy one minute and crying the next. They sure can. Nobody's taught them emotional management, but they have that huge variability, flexibility. That's what we want, but in a managed way. We don't want to have emotional whacked out. I mean, I think what I hear you saying also that's so important about being able to go from a nice rest and digest to a fight or flight and come back again is that it removes that sort of bad chronicity of stress and being under a threat response that so many of us live under and that is what is really harming our mental health, our physical health, driving burnout.

37:02Yeah. You got it. Yeah. Yeah. I have a colleague I admire very much, Emma Seppala Yale. And she often talks about toddlers and their emotions. And as a beautiful example, you know, that a toddler will be flooded with rage because someone took their toy and they're just hysterical, right? Screaming and crying. And then it passes and then they go play or they have to take a nap. It's just the ultimate example of sort of being able to let the emotion flow through you. It's energy. She calls it energy in motion. And then you're done. You're done. You're not holding on to it. You're just done. Well, a child can do that easily partly because of high heart rate variability.

37:50So is it a chicken or egg thing? I don't understand. Is it the emotional flexibility that causes the heart rate variability or the heart rate variability that causes the emotional flexibility? It's a two-way street. It could be either one. Just like if you use our heart mouse sensor and you see that your heart rhythm pattern, heart rate variability is really jagged and irregular and you feel a stressful emotion, it's like then you use the quick coherence technique and you see it shift. That breathing rhythm and attitude rhythm is giving you that leg up to feel better. And you shifting to something you feel grateful for changes the rhythm.

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41:19If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com slash anxiousachiever and start your free trial. Shopify.com slash anxiousachiever to hear your first... You know, the other day I was talking with my friend who is both a certified financial planner and a financial therapist. we were talking about money and emotions. Money is way more than dollars and cents. It's emotional, right? And I'm trying to teach my kids to have healthier emotions around money than I did. But I'm getting better every year. And part of it is that I use Monarch. Monarch simplifies, identifies, and helps me have a plan for my money.

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42:52That's$50 off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever. Gratitude to me is the most transformative of technique I've learned. I tend towards the depressed and anxious. And so for me, just five minutes of gratitude with breathing can get me through a hard day. It really can. Well, you discovered it that I'm just telling you the underlying physiology and appreciation of gratitude is the, for most people, the easiest feeling to use with quick coherence technique, which is what I just taught you breathing through the heart and then finding something you appreciate or feel grateful for and feeling it because of the feeling that does the magic and there's a carryover effect when you're in heart rhythm coherence and you do what you just described it does carry over through the good portion of your day because it's syncing up your heart brain nervous system and gives you that high performing state, which is a state of moving in ease, moving in calm, moving in clarity.

44:06And all that's happening because you got into heart rate variability coherence, whether you knew it or not. Whether you knew it or not. I'm going to check my questions. I want to talk a little bit about how heart rate variability coherence can be applied during the workday. Because I think a lot of listeners to this show are very focused on mental health and well-being at work. Obviously, during any given day, we are triggered hundreds of times, potentially, we go from highs to lows, and we may just be also in that perpetual threat state. Talk us through how we might rethink our day using your methodology.

44:59I use it, our culture at HeartMath, this is part of our culture, is to use the HeartMath techniques and tools throughout the day. In the morning, it's so important, even if you're a meditator and you spend 20 minutes in meditation, get in the heart rhythm coherence. You can use the HeartMath app and just use the camera sensor or you can get our high-end sensor. But get into the real HRV coherence. That would be my advice because that preps you for more clarity and flow and more active higher brain function, cognitive facilitation. Whereas stress and anxious, getting the kids off to school and running fast and feeling stressed and worried about what's going to happen, a meeting, that incoherence actually creates cortical inhibition.

45:51It shuts down your higher intuitive and clarity functions. So it's not very efficient or effective. So get coherent first, then start moving through your day. And again, it only takes five minutes. It's not a half an hour, 20 minute meditation. Five minutes of heart rhythm coherence practice can last you. And that's why, like you just said, appreciation really sets you with breathing. It's so simple. It can seem too simple, but it's so powerful and effective. Then you build into your day prompts so that before a meeting that could be challenging, you do it again for a couple minutes. After you get triggered, you become more self-aware.

46:39Wait a minute, I'm triggered. Do I really want to spend this day feeling crappy the rest of the day or having this backwash from all the stress? You get smart. You go, no, I'm going to make a smart move. I'm going to get back into coherence, release that, and then I'm moving on in my higher clarity again. So you want to build it into your work day or any day, but especially a work day, especially if there's things you love to do or relationships at work or meetings where you want to be creative or you're doing creative writing, it elevates your workday into a much more effective, fulfilling experience.

47:19And so in our company, we make it a cultural thing. We sit down at any point in a meeting when it gets dysregulated, we say, let's pause. Let's do a one-minute quick coherence together. Simply just what we did, just breathing into the heart. And activating a feeling of gratitude, appreciation for something, even if it's not the person in front of you. Pick your puppy dog or when your baby was born. It doesn't matter what, it's evoking the feeling that counts. Or a time in nature or a walk by the ocean. Recall something or if you have a picture of a loved one on your desk, you want to feel that connection.

48:03It's opening the heart and allowing that heart energy to balance the nervous system and reset, reboot your brain. It's like your own inner computer. You know, your computer goes glitchy, you reboot, you restart. It's the same thing with our own inner operating system. We're just getting the manual clear by the physiology that we're researching. And it's very powerful. So when there's a conflict between people, we have a technique called coherent communication. It incorporates active listening, but you're getting into coherence first so that you're not reactive. You're in that synced up state to communicate authentically and hear the other person's, not just their words, but where they're coming from, their essence.

48:53That resolves most conflicts. People learn to get along with each other when it's that heart-connected communication. And I'm not talking about something mushy. I'm talking about power, real heart power. What would you say? I read an interesting article a few years ago in The New Yorker about the dangers of emotional intelligence and our focus on emotional regulation. You know that sometimes we need to be angry. Sometimes we need to feel anxiety. We need to go up in a big way. And that trying constantly to manage our emotions is a form of repression. Right. We don't talk about coherence isn't repressing.

49:50It is inventing. if we allow our emotions to take over, we're drained. I don't even care if it's too much excitement about something. It imbalances us. What we're talking about here, just like with sports, anger can be an activator to our authenticity, and so can anxiety. It's how long we stay there and stay stuck there. And it's not about repressing or venting because neither of them are effective because you're shutting down the higher cortical functions. That's their physiology. If you get activated, I mean, look what's happening in the world, all the anger and the emotional mismanagement and the biases and the polarization and everybody thinking they're right and the other's wrong and judging and blaming.

50:42I'm sorry, but we're not going to have a future as humanity unless we learn how to come back to a nervous system balance, listen with the heart, care, appreciate. And yes, we can get triggered into anxiety or anger. All emotions have information for us. They're all about what's behind it. What is motivating the anger or the anxiety? What's, is it an anxiety habit that we've had from childhood that just is an amygdala trigger? Right, right. Or is it really something we should be afraid of? Right, like there's a boulder coming towards us. Right, right. We have to go deeper and understand the information.

51:26What's the emotion trying to tell us? Most of the time, it's just our ego reacting or our habits. And we want to use that for our empowerment, for our growth, personal growth. We don't want to be stuck there. That's right. Right. So it's the being able to move through. that's why we call it heart intelligence rather than emotional intelligence you're really using the heart brain and sync to be able to get a bigger picture view of that information yeah well dr roseman thank you so much um this was wonderful i really i really appreciate it um you you probably can't see but i have my cat in my lap purring which my cat is very much my little regulator here.

52:23Cats do that. Can you imagine what this world would be like if we didn't have pet dogs and cats? I know. I mean, it would be horrible because that is what soothes people and opens their heart. I mean, when I teach this to children, and they're really good at this, once they understand and they love the technology to see what's happening, they learn these emotional skills, call it that. And they, their favorite thing to focus on is, you know, sometimes it's their mom or their dad or their pet, but it's chocolate chip cookies. Well, of course, whose heart doesn't sing for chocolate chip cookies.

53:01I know. You know what? It gets you into coherence. Great. Thank you very much. You're very welcome. I encourage people go to heartmath.com. See what we have there. Try out the HeartMath app or sensor. There's a seven-day free trial. Get the sensor. You know, just explore what's there because all the basic science as well as the techniques and the HeartMath experience is there for you for free. It's life-changing this work. So yes, I endorse. Thank you.

53:39that's it for this week's show if you like the show follow us and tell your friends and please leave us a review it really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content i'm your host maura aarons mealy lots more to come in the next episode

54:08Thank you.