Heart coherence and adaptation to stress
Transform your stress through heart coherence to achieve better health and resilience
It is well known that stress affects the body, mind, and emotions.
The state you perceive as "stress" arises as a reaction to an adverse situation but it’s not the situation itself that causes stress, it’s how you perceive it, how you respond to it. People react differently to the same event depending on the meaning and value they assign to it.
This is why methods have been developed to influence our internal response because we can’t always control what happens outside of us.
It has been found that emotions have a powerful impact on the body. Positive emotions such as appreciation, compassion, kindness, and gratitude help synchronize various systems in the body, thereby improving their function.
Research has shown that when we intentionally shift into a positive emotional state, our heart rhythm changes immediately, and shortly after, this leads to beneficial changes throughout the body and brain.
When you're stressed, the systems in your body are out of sync. Draining emotions like anger, frustration, anxiety, and envy cause imbalances in the nervous system, which in turn disrupt the rest of the body.
Positive, renewing emotions like appreciation, kindness, compassion, and gratitude create order and harmony among the body’s systems, producing a special physiological state called coherence. The heart plays a central role in this process, which is why it’s commonly referred to as heart coherence or heart-brain coherence.
Heart-brain coherence naturally leads to improved mental clarity, creativity, and resilience in challenging situations.
How can you achieve heart coherence in practice?
A simple way to reduce your negative stress response is by practicing Heart Coherence Activation two to three times a day for just a few minutes. The best times are in the morning upon waking, at night before sleep, around lunchtime or whenever you feel ready. You can also use it any time a stressful event occurs, or when you want to regain balance, boost your energy, or gain mental clarity.
Let’s try it now:
1. Focus your attention on the area of the heart.
To help you keep your attention centered on the heart, if needed, you can place your hand or fingertips gently over that area.
2. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart of chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. Find an easy rhythm that’s comfortable.
Try to inhale for 5 seconds and exhale for 5 seconds, so that each full breathing cycle lasts about 10 seconds. There's no need to pause between breaths or force anything, just explore what feels comfortable for you.
3. As you continue heart-focused breathing, make a sincere attempt to experience a regenerative feeling such as appreciation or care for someone or something in your life.
To become familiar, commit for a daily habit to identify three reasons from your life or from the events of that day for which you can feel gratitude, appreciation, or compassion. You can even keep a journal, a list, or simple notes of these moments that help you respond positively and reread them from time to time. In doing so, your memory will gradually fill with more positive experiences, counterbalancing the brain's natural tendency to retain negative ones.
By practicing this technique consistently over time, you can experience better sleep, a sense of calm, inner peace, and increased energy. You can reduce stress and anxiety, enhance your self-regulation and self-control skills, and maintain mental and emotional balance.
Through techniques derived from heart coherence, you can deepen your self-awareness, learn to navigate your intuition, and direct your inner resources to boost your immune resilience and support optimal health.
Quick steps:
- Heart-focused breathing
- Activate a positive or renewing feeling.
Dr. Adrian Alecu