Build Stress Resilience With The HeartMath Method

Deborah Rozman, PhD

Well, thank you so much, Dr. Sharlin, and I’m honored to be here. First of all, I’m not the founder of HeartMath. I am the president and co-CEO, and I have been with HeartMath since its inception. I coauthored the book with the founder, Doc Childre, who is the chairman. We coauthored a whole series of books called the Transforming Series based upon some breakthrough research, which I am happy to tell you about, which is about transforming anger, transforming stress, transforming anxiety, and transforming depression. They’re all alike, although they’re different, as we all know. But the communication between the heart and the brain—the discommunication and the desynchronization—are at the heart of a lot of those issues. My background has been as a behavioral psychologist for the last 50 years. I stopped working with patients when I began to work with HeartMath and found the HeartMath Research Lab, where we wanted to research because he anticipated this huge increase in stress that we’re seeing. Research on how the heart, brain, and nervous system talk to each other as to what are the mechanisms of the stress response and from our perceptions and feelings so that we could develop a series of training, tools, technologies, and programs like Dr. Sharlin uses to help people manage and transform their stress response. That’s a little background on myself; I’ve authored a dozen books, and I’ll be happy to share that with you.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

This is the Parkinson’s Solutions Summit. What we are saying in part is that building stress resilience, or understanding the biology of our stress response system and how we can become champions of that, is one of the cornerstones of changing the trajectory of Parkinson’s. It both acts as a trigger, if you will, but also as a mediator. What we want to do is mediate this disease process in a way that ultimately puts us back in the driver’s seat and allows us to serve and to live our lives in the way we ultimately want to live. It is so critical to address this piece as an overall or holistic plan for Parkinson’s disease.

Deborah Rozman, PhD

I totally agree. My mother passed away from Parkinson’s, and when I watched her initially, she had an unusual type of Parkinson’s, meaning she didn’t have the motor shakes. She would be unbalanced walking at times, but she lost her voice; she lost her ability to talk, and it went gradually. What was fascinating was to see how the gift of that or the learning of it made enough to go deeper into her own body and heart and listen deeper—releasing a lot of stress that she didn’t even know she had; it had built up and accumulated in her system. I was able to watch this on my own on wakening, watching my mother go through this process and what she learned from it, but also seeing how much the stress, worry, and overcare that had been personality traits of hers may have actually contributed to some of her symptoms.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Because these things have an energetic and a biochemical, even a structural and a cellular basis to them. It’s so important that we understand we’re using this word stress that has many manifestations all at once. We were just talking to Dr. Miles Nichols, who’s going to be in the summit, and he was sharing the story of a patient with Parkinson’s who would get into a meditative state and the patient’s tremor would go away. then when they weren’t meditating, the tremor would come back that he was modulating the expression of that disease and how his brain worked just by meditating.

Deborah Rozman, PhD

That doesn’t surprise me at all, because we hear that for other diseases, meditation helps. From our research at HeartMath, we were looking underneath that. How is the autonomic nervous system behaving as if there’s a lot of autonomic imbalance between the parasympathetic and the sympathetic, and the traffic and vagal nerve communication back to the brain is erratic? Then you’re going to trigger more of those stress habits, stress reactions, and anxiety reactions, and who knows what? Over time, those habits are due to imbalances in brain chemistry. But in time, if you can start to get more autonomic balance, and of course meditation is certain breathing exercises geared to bring more of that harmony between the parasympathetic and synthetic, it’s only natural that the nervous system might fall down.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

It’s so interesting to me because we were recently talking about a test, and I have to admit I had never used it in my practice, but it is hardwired into the movement disorder society’s criteria for the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, which is called MIBG sonography of the heart. The principle of this test is that there is a nuclear medicine tracer that’s given to the patient, and this tracer has a high affinity for noradrenergic neurons, basically your sympathetic nervous system of the heart. But people who have Parkinson’s disease also have some degeneration of the sympathetic nervous system of the heart and, of course, probably also of the brain. But this test will have decreased uptake to support the diagnosis. We often talk about bringing strength or enhancing that parasympathetic ability to rest, digest, and repair. But it’s interesting to me too that there are issues even on the other side of that autonomic nervous system with the sympathetic nervous system, and that they involve the heart.

Deborah Rozman, PhD

The autonomic nervous system is so connected to the heart. When we teach in our health professional training, you have to use HeartMath. It’s all about learning to bring your heart rhythm pattern measured by heart rate variability, to beat, to make changes in heart rate that are reflective of what’s going on in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and their interaction, and being able to bring that heart rate variability into a more synchronized pattern as you measure H or B over time sends a whole different signal to the brain than when we’re stressed or frustrated. that creates a very incoherent, imbalanced, and jagged interaction between the two parts of the autonomic nervous system. That window into the heart—the window into heart rate and heart rhythm—has a lot of information that we can use.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

That is at the core of what HeartMath actually is. If you don’t mind, Dr. Rozman, not everyone will be familiar with heart rate variability. Could you just take a moment to explain that term?

Deborah Rozman, PhD

Sure. People used to think that it was healthy for your heart to just be like a metronome. But when you say your heart rate is, say, 50 beats per minute or 60 beats per minute or whatever, that’s an average over a minute with every single heartbeat, your heart rate is actually changing. That’s what heart rate variability means. The beat to beat to beat changes in heart rate. So, for example, your heart rate average over a minute could be, say, 70 beats per minute. But in that 70 beats per minute average, it could be 80 beats, 50, 60, or 90 beats down to 60 beats. Over time, if you plot that beat-to-beat change, you see a pattern, and you can have an average heart rate of 70 beats per minute and have that pattern be chaotic, reflective of stressful emotions like anxiety, stress, frustration, or anger.

The more stressful you feel, the more angry and anxious you are, and the more jagged and irregular that heart rate variable pattern is. If you’re feeling grateful, loving, kind, caring, and compassionate, that autonomic nervous system’s beat changes, and the heart rate becomes very smooth. They’re like a sine wave, going up and down in a very harmonious way. That’s called a coherent waveform. We call that heart rate variability coherence or heart rhythm coherence. It’s a core of HeartMath training: how do we help people recognize what they’re feeling and use heart rate variability and biofeedback to see what’s happening in their heart rhythm, and then be able to have simple techniques to change that, to change it to a smooth, coherent rhythm, which changes how you feel? It changes the communication from the heart to the brain because the heart is actually talking to the brain in four different ways. Most of us haven’t been taught that, and there’s actually more nervous system signals after and signals going through the vagus nerve from the heart to the brain, telling the brain what the body feels. Then there are signals going from the brain to the heart. I always taught that the brain controls the heart, and that’s not true. It’s just a two-way dialog going on. For optimal health and wellness, we want to get that traffic moving smoothly.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

The new details, some of those, there’s four different ways.

Deborah Rozman, PhD

Sure. One way is the blood pressure way. We all know that blood pressure is actually conveying information to the brain about the chemistry of the body and how the body feels. Then another way is the vagal nerve track that I just mentioned. A third way is energetic, meaning every heartbeat is putting out 2.5 watts of power. Now that can be measured by a magnetometer. 3 to 5 feet from the body are probably sensitive as magnetometers. That’s how we often pick up on each other’s vibes. We can guess where your room is and don’t see any faces, but we feel that tension in the air. That’s from the radiation of the emotional state of the people. It’s being broadcast just like an electromagnetic field. Every power source produces an electromagnetic field. The brain, which you can only measure in a few inches, even though there’s a lot of electricity, is the largest in the body, and we pick up on each other’s feelings as they’re broadcast, like radio waves through the electromagnetic field. That’s where we can go into a cathedral.

Then you feel uplifted because there have been so many radiating hearts over time. We feel that, and we talk about picking up on each other’s vibrations. So much of that is communicated through this heart’s feel. The heart’s field is also communicating and bathing our brain in our cells with every heartbeat. that information. If you’re angry a lot, you are radiating that in a coherent, parasympathetic, sympathetic interaction with every cell. Hear about it. You’re radiating that radio transmission of anger through your heart’s electromagnetic field and to your brain. How we feel and our stress reactions do impact us through energetics, through that electromagnetic field, as well as biochemistry. That’s another way the heart communicates with the brain: hormonally. It was only in the 1990s that it was discovered that the heart contains as much oxytocin as the brain. The heart produces a lot of other brain chemicals. The heart contains a peptide of your own natural peptide, which is often called a balancing hormone with receptors in the brain. It’s fascinating all the new information we’ve been discovering about the heart, including that this was also in the 1990s, as the heart has its own intrinsic nervous system with about 40,000 sensory neurons that can learn, feel, sense, and remember.

These sensory neurons are independent of the brain. There is no connection between the brain in the head and the brain and the little brain in the heart, but the little brain in the heart will send information through the vagal nerve to the brain in the head. But they’re not the brain in the head; they’re not controlling the brain in the heart. It’s just fascinating, all these new discoveries in the last 50 years that the heart is so much more than a blood vessel, that it’s producing hormones, that it’s producing electromagnetic fields, and that it’s producing information about how the body feels, sending it to the brain upstairs. It’s a very important part of any intervention.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

HeartMath is a company, but it’s also a nonprofit organization. They can perhaps touch on that toward the end. HeartMath is technology, and it’s a belief system. It sounds like it’s an embrace of a wide variety of factors that look at the interaction between the heart and the brain and human health. But if I want to engage in HeartMath, how can I specifically do that?

Deborah Rozman, PhD

We like to say we’re not about belief, because belief can be based on something that isn’t validated. Whereas HeartMath started off as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit heart institute, which still exists, it still does research to research all the heart, brain, nervous system, and talk to each other. What we discovered—what was published in the American Journal of Cardiology in 1995—is the first time they saw a critical link between emotional state and the rhythms of the heart, the physical heart. That was a big breakthrough. So then we began to develop tools, techniques, technology, and training programs to help people self-regulate emotionally, self-regulate how they feel, and how the physiology and power of that up so we can change mood, change that neural traffic, and change habits as a result. a lot of pre- and post-assessments, there’s now over 500 independent peer-reviewed studies based upon HeartMath’s work.

So, training tools, technology that shows your heart rate, and your variability pattern—all of this is part of what we call HeartMath’s system. We were starting stress management programs in companies to help them understand this and learn the techniques for in-the-moment stress management. Rather than just waiting till you take a hot bath or have time to meditate, you can actually shift that heart rhythm pattern right in the moment. That is so key to stopping the energy drain. We were helping companies reduce health care costs and helping hospitals reduce turnover. Our nonprofit attorney said at that time that if you want to develop a training business or a technology business, start with a for-profit company and have them work together. You productize the research that comes out of the nonprofit.

That’s how HeartMath Inc. started where I’m at. I moved over from the nonprofit to the for-profit business as the president to be able to take an investment and expand it around the world. Again, it’s turning a lot of what we thought upside down—that the brain is in charge of everything. We live from here up. We live as a whole system—body, heart, mind, emotions, and brain—and we want to get them all in sync and working together creatively. That’s optimal performance in optimal health. The key to that we found was in this heart rhythm coherence waveform that actually helps the autonomic nervous system, which controls 90% of the body’s involuntary functions from digestion. The elimination and immune responses are all in response. Get everything; they’re in sync, and it helps get the brain, the cells, and the whole system in sync. That’s basically what our purpose has been: to awaken people to this intelligence of the heart, this power of the heart, and how we can harness it.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

We often talk in functional medicine about when you have a gut feeling about things. That’s true because we have the enteric nervous system of the digestive tract. Now we’re hearing that we have the cardiac nervous system, the heart nervous system, and that our heart feelings are our heart energetic impulses, if you will, which are equally, perhaps, if not more powerful, than things that work in symphonies in concert with one another.

Deborah Rozman, PhD

Yes, it’s fascinating research. This is published in two back-to-back issues of the Alternative Therapies Journal, and this was research we did and replicated. It’s someone else’s research from some years ago, but we call it intuition research. What we found was that by randomly showing pictures, either gory ones or beautiful ones, on a computer to subjects who are all wired up, before the computer even chose which type of picture it was going to select, the heart knew it, responded consistently, and then, through a heartbeat, evoked potential.

It would send the signal to the brain, and the brain would send it to the body, to the gut. intuitive knowing gut feeling is actually a tertiary response. The first response is in the heart rhythm. It’s totally unconscious, and then it’s a signal to the brain, even before the picture was selected. This is quantum-effect stuff. Then, once there was sensory recognition, the brain told the gut. There’s so much information in that study. It’s been replicated since then, and we don’t know enough about how intuition works. That’s what we call our newest book, Heart Intelligence: Connecting with the Heart’s Intuitive Guidance for Effective Choices and Solutions. But the whole saying is, Listen to your heart. Go deep into your heart, or announce or follow your heart’s physiological parlance, and we’re just uncovering it. So, yes, gut feelings are important, but even more sensitive as a priority are your heart feelings. 

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

I tell people sometimes,  you can die from a broken heart.

Deborah Rozman, PhD

Well, yes. Heart attack is attacking back on the heart, too. Very often, stress creates that. Because think of all that incoherence in the heart rhythm pattern that accumulates over time until there is a breakdown.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

We often talk in functional medicine about how chronic inflammation plays a major role in the diseases that afflict our society. These complex chronic diseases, whether it’s diabetes and high blood pressure or Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, so forth, I’m thinking now that as we learn more about these diseases as well, there’s another component where we’re seeing the accumulation of proteins, say, in the brain. We called the protein alpha-synuclein, which is the major protein that composes the Lewy bodies in Parkinson’s. The presence of alpha synuclein is an entirely normal thing in the human brain, but very much in parallel with Alzheimer’s disease, where we have the accumulation of the beta amyloid protein, where it can serve normal purposes or, in some cases, be a response to inflammatory signals and become this insoluble amyloid. In Parkinson’s disease, we have insoluble alpha synuclein, probably responding to inflammatory signals in the body. We know that it doesn’t just have to be in the brain; it can be in the digestive tract, as in Parkinson’s disease. What I’m doing is thinking through this, but I’m trying. I’m collecting this idea that by utilizing HeartMath, technology, and the principles and science that underlie HeartMath, we can ultimately address this thing we call chronic inflammation. There is theoretical potential; at least there’s at least one or two papers out there that suggest that this is in fact the case. We may be able to influence some of the protein biomarkers of Parkinson’s itself through that modulation of inflammation.

Deborah Rozman, PhD

Studies need to be done directly; look at that, just like there are studies being done now for heart rate variability, cell regulation, and Alzheimer’s. that there have been others with other types of inflammatory diseases. Every time we have an anger reaction or anxiety reaction, which we’re all going to have, it’s just how long we let it run in our system and how debilitating it can be over time. But there’s 1400 biochemicals that are released. If you include a lot of cortisol and adrenaline, and if you can just imagine that building up and building up, how could it not create an inflammatory reaction in the system or other types of debilitating imbalances? So, 90% of primary care physician visits are estimated by the American Institute of Stress for stress-related complaints. The advice on how to reduce stress is mostly conceptual. Don’t worry, relax, or go on vacation. Work, love, sleep, and eat right. All these things are important. Get it? But they’re not addressing this chronic reaction in the moment with a little stress, as throughout the day and the impatience, the frustrations, the things that build up, and the regrets of having pressed go on the email when you should when you wish you could take it, you think we all experience.

In our modern society, the way everything’s sped up happens over and over. We need to learn how. At least that’s what we discovered in HeartMath’s research. How do we make these shifts in the moment before they imbalance our system? How do we learn that we’re all going to trigger? How do you come back to ease and balance? How do you take charge of that? How do you regulate your emotional reactions? That is the source; if you ask me where people could learn more, there’s research papers all over the HeartMath website, but we developed a program called The HeartMath Experience, which is an hour and a half interactive film, or you can watch it in ten-minute video segments, and it gives an overview of the research. Since their inception, it has given you five HeartMath techniques that you can use throughout your day that can help you reset, rebalance, or prepare for your stressful situation. We’re giving that away. We just feel the world saying heartmath.com and downloading that for free or heartmath.org in order for you to learn some of these basic tools and test them on yourself, be your own citizen scientist or self-scientist, and see if it makes you feel different or perceive things differently.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Now there’s actual technology as well that it is possible to purchase from your company. We use the inner balance mostly, but we also use the M-wave device. Can you talk about those?

Deborah Rozman, PhD

Yes, sure. Well, the em-wave device is handheld, doesn’t need your phone, and it can also be by itself, where it shows you a pattern of your heart rhythm in real time. Then it connects to software that is a training tool that has different little visualizations and games that operate on your heart rhythm and coherence level to train you into a new baseline of heart rate variability and coherence. It has a coherent breathing pacer, and that’s the handheld. then the Em-Wave Pro Plus has HIV assessments in it for health professionals to use. You can have multiple users on there. You can have all your patients have their own file on that and track progress. We have a stress and wellbeing assessment that you can use to help reveal what some of the underlying unconscious stresses are and how people focus on them. then, within six weeks, use the HeartMath tools and techniques and HIV feedback. You usually see a baseline shift. Just phenomenal results at the end of six weeks tend to be like a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 60% reduction in depression, and more than that, better sleep and less exhaustion. that comes from regulating the heart rate variability pattern and using these techniques to come back into autonomic balance more frequently.

That’s phenomenal results. These are people who said that they felt depressed or anxious often, which results from learning self-regulation. Then the inner balance that Dr. Sharlin was talking about is the mobile phone app and sensor clips; your ear plugs into your mobile phone, and that way you can use the bluetooth sensor, which works on Android or iOS devices and clips to your ear, but you don’t have to plug it into the phone. There’s a free app. The inner balance app that you can use to track your progress: We have a thing called Heart Cloud that stores all your data, and you can send it to your health professional so they can track your progress with you. But these are very powerful tools because, in real time, as you see your heart rate, your ability pattern changes. As with the heart rate technique, you see a change in real time into more coherence. You see, when you started feeling frustrated, it got really jagged and irregular again. It’s a wonderful tool for emotional awareness and emotional skill development.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Immediate, objective feedback. Sometimes we say there’s a difference between information and implementation sessions, and so on. Many of us do struggle with that implementation, especially making it a long-term habit and part of who we are. That has been so instrumental in training other practitioners to teach and train in HeartMath. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that could be very helpful for the viewers of the summit?

Deborah Rozman, PhD

We all evolved out of the need, and we now probably have about 25,000 health professionals in various mental health, physical health, and other specialties who use HeartMath in some way. We have the HeartMath intervention program, How to Use the Em-wave Pro with your patients. It’s totally online. We have the HeartMath clinical certification and will see credits, and that’s a six-week online program for the basic understanding of how this works. then some simple HeartMath techniques you can use for yourself, and then guide your patients. We find that so many health professionals, frontline workers, and hospitals are so stressed out. It’s important to care for the caregivers. You’ll see what it does for you. You are more capable of advising your patients as well. We have certification programs for health coaches, and building personal resilience is one of them.

Then we have a whole program for workshop presenters. The coherence advantage and all of these came from the pull of the demand. How do we change? How do I better teach my patients? How do I care for myself? With respect, 150 now-certified HeartMath chief nurses are in the Kaiser Northern California health system. Then they teach the other nurses, and now they’re looking at how we bring this to the patients. It just shortens the recovery time of a lot of challenges and health challenges, and it prevents the acceleration of a lot of diseases. Heart rate variability is the greatest. It’s healthiest. It’s the most dynamic when you’re born, and it used to be that they just used HIV for fetal monitoring. Now HIV is being used for sports recovery by looking at what happens during sleep. But HeartMath is probably one of the few organizations looking at the pattern of HIV over time, which directly reflects your emotional state and how you can begin to develop real emotional self-regulation power, which is key to changing our habits and neural habits. Change can happen in about six weeks. It’s just pretty phenomenal if people practice regularly.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Was that brain, would you say?

Deborah Rozman, PhD

Yes, it’s amazing. Again, we all have a heart. We all can do this. We teach children some of these skills at a young age because nobody teaches them how to manage their emotions. I know it’s repressed in them, but transforming them is a whole other thing.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

This is going to be important for both. Let me just put it this way for people of all ages: children, young adults, and as we get older and our bodies start to wear down for a variety of reasons and we get into an age where some of these complex chronic diseases may appear, this is going to be an important tool in your toolbox. Both to help prevent and potentially theoretically to mediate or modulate the expression and experience of these difficult diseases like Parkinson’s that affect people. Dr. Rozman, I wonder if we want to do things slightly out of order. We just have a few minutes left, and I would ask if people want to connect with the HeartMath company or the nonprofit and how they can do that. You touched on the video series and so forth, but just to be absolutely clear on what they need to do, I do want to end. I hope it’s okay with a brief HeartMath experience, and we can end our interview today in that quiet.

Deborah Rozman, PhD

Well, I just want to say that if you go to heartmath.com and click on Health Professionals, you’ll see all the programs for health professionals there. You can contact some of our people who work directly with health professionals, like people who work with Dr. Sharlin. If you want to look at the research and all the research papers in HeartMath, just explore a little bit. One thing that’s struck my heart is that, maybe a month ago, about 40% of teenagers in the United States were reporting that they’re depressed, that it’s like an epidemic. that is going, and that’s not dealt with. They are given tools for how to lift that or see a new perspective that’s going to lead to more chronic diseases as they age. The tools are simple. We have a program for teens called Smart Brain. Wise Heart. We’re just trying to reach everybody with tools that people can use.

So, yes, just go to heartmath.com, get the HeartMath experience, click, get your health professional and your interest area, and someone will be in touch with you. Let’s close with one of the HeartMath techniques. Let’s call this quick coherence because it quickly shifts your heart rhythm pattern to heart rate variability. You do that in sine wave form. You are hooked up to our inner balance sensor right now. You would have noticed. Step one is to focus your attention on the area of the heart, and you will be surprised at how hard this is for a lot of people. Shift your focus from your mind or emotions to the area around your heart. Putting your hand on your heart or closing your eyes and just letting your mind rest in your heart area can help. As you focus on your heart, pretend like your breath is flying in and out. Excuse me of the heart or just area breathing a little slower, a little deeper than normal. That’s fine. An easy rhythm that’s comfortable. We’ll do this for about five breaths in the area of the heart and out. Maybe do five or so.

But you want to stay focused on the now as you continue this heart-focused breathing recall or activate a genuine feeling of appreciation or care that you have for someone or something in your life. Something that is easy for you to feel or evoke—that feeling of appreciation, care, kindness, heart, and quality—could be a time in nature to be a connection with someone you love, a connection with your pet. Whatever evokes that, if you can’t feel appreciation or care, just feel calm. Our calm, an attitude of appreciation, then you just do that for about another ten breaths, but in the heart, evoking a feeling that our quality, and that’ll shift your heart rhythms and create new coherence. That’s just the first HeartMath technique. It goes on from there.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Dr. Deborah Rozman, president and CEO of HeartMath, thank you so much for joining us today at the Parkinson’s Solutions Summit.

Deborah Rozman, PhD

Well, thank you so much for having me. Again, my mother passed away from it, but she learned some of these tools before then, and she gained so much value from them. Please share. Thank you.