Take the Holmes Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale to determine how significantly stress is affecting your health.

  What Is Stress?
  When/How Does Stress Affect My Health?
  Heartmath: A Tool to Change Your Response to Stress
  Who Needs a Heartmath Session?
  What Can Be Determined From a HeartMath Session?
  Clinical Benefits of HeartMath
  How Does the Heartmath Technique Work?
  What Happens During the Session?

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Stress-related illness has become the number one malady of our time. Stress is a common term used to describe the wear and tear the body experiences due to everyday tensions, challenges and pressures. Change, illness, injury, or career and lifestyle alterations are all frequent daily events that precipitate stress for people. However, stress actually resides in our reactions to these challenging circumstances, not in the circumstances themselves.

Stress is often misunderstood as we blame outside events for the source of the disturbance. External challenges can, in fact, have a favorable influence on people by motivating growth and learning--by encouraging us to reach beyond our limits. Stress only provokes illness when our emotional and physical responses to these changes disrupt the delicate balance in the mind or body. Stress occurs when our perception of events does not meet our expectations and we are unable to manage our reaction. Stress expresses itself as resistance to situations, tension, strain or frustration and throws off our physiological and psychological equilibrium. If the equilibrium remains disturbed for long, the stress can become chronic and disabling. Eliminating stress from life is impossible, instead you should focus on managing it and reversing the damage it can cause.

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Stress affects people physically, mentally, and emotionally. According to the American Institute of Stress, up to 90% of all health problems are related to stress. Imbalanced reactions to life’s challenges can contribute to and agitate many health conditions including heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, depression and sleep disorders. Adverse reactions to stress occur when patients do not have appropriate responses to the stressors that challenge them everyday. Therefore, learning coping mechanisms or stress management techniques can positively impact your healthcare for the rest of your life.

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Employing advanced biofeedback technology, HeartMath is a simple tool for evaluating a person’s ability to manage his/her stress and for teaching an easy practice that patients can repeat anytime, anywhere to cope with life’s daily challenges in a healthy way. HeartMath is another term for heart rate variability feedback. Heart rate variability (HRV) is a measure of the naturally occurring beat-to-beat changes in heart rhythms. Analysis of these minor discrepancies provides a powerful, non-invasive tool for understanding the complex relationship between our heart rhythms and our nervous system. In other words, this technique opens a window through which we can evaluate heart-brain interactions—the connection between how we think, how we feel and our physiology—and autonomic nervous system dynamics —our unconscious physical responses to events out of our control.

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• Are you overly tired or fatigued?
• Are you often nervous, anxious or depressed?
• Do you feel driven, hyperactive, or restless?
• Do you tend to make snap decisions with lots of errors?
• Do you have sleeping problems?
• Do you have chronic headaches or minor aches and pains?
• Do you worry often or experience a lot of uncertainty with your job/finances/relationships?
• Do you have symptoms that persist despite good healthcare?
• How did you score on the Holmes Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale?

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Emotions have a powerful impact on the human body. Feelings such as frustration, insecurity and depression inhibit proper immune function, disturb hormonal balance, disrupt blood sugar regulation, and increase the pain and suffering of chronic complaints. On the other hand, positive emotions like appreciation, care and love not only feel good, but promote health, performance and well-being. Research has shown that intentionally shifting from a negative to a positive emotion has immediate effects on heart rhythms. A shift in heart rhythms creates a favorable cascade of neural, hormonal and biochemical events that supports a healthy immune system, balances hormonal output, promotes the healing of chronic conditions, and benefits the entire body. The stress-reducing effects are both immediate and long-lasting.

During your HeartMath session, you will learn about the ways in which your negative reactions to stress are effecting your heart rhythms, your breath and ultimately your health. The technician will thoroughly review the data collected in your session and will evaluate with you the degree to which you are able to achieve coherence, a state in which all body systems are operating in harmony. You will also learn your vitality rating with your current coping mechanisms and you will observe the boost in vitality that your system receives while utilizing the HeartMath techniques. In addition, the session will generate information regarding your breathing pattern and your heart rate variability, two important measures of stress management.

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This technique has been successfully used to reduce the stress-related symptoms of:

Tension and migraine headaches Recurrent abdominal pain Insomnia Cardiovascular disease High blood pressure Irritable bowel syndrome Habit disorders/Addictions Tics/Tourettes syndrome Anxiety/Depression Anger management Emotional dysregulation Asperger’s syndrome/Autism Performance anxiety

ADD/ADHD Asthma Chronic pain Fibromyalgia Cancer Atopic dermatitis Diabetes Types I and II Reflex sympathetic dystrophy Sickle cell anemia Immune system dysfunction Crohn’s disease/Ulcerative colitis Muscle spasms

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This technique assists patients in learning internal awareness, self-regulation and emotional management skills. In turn, people who regularly employ this practice become capable of preventing stress by becoming aware of the beginnings of a stress response and stopping it in the moment. The monitor provides instant feedback as to how certain breathing rhythms and thoughts affect the level of stress experienced by the body. Armed with this information, the patient is more able to apply these techniques once he/she has left the office. Patients learn to transform the disorder in their heart rhythms and nervous systems caused by negative emotions into coherence and harmony with the influence of positive thoughts and synchronized breathing.

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The technician will welcome you into the room and have you listen to a short tutorial on the physiological benefits of systemic coherence—all body systems working together—and how to achieve it through linking your breathing to your heart rhythms. Then, you will run through a series of intervals in which the monitor will record your breathing pattern and its physiological effects as you are hooked up to the computer by an electrode pad attached to your middle finger. During the first interval, the technician will obtain a baseline and the patient will have a chance to observe the way in which his/her unconscious breathing pattern affects his/her health. Next, the technician will lead the patient through three intervals during which a metronome will guide the patient through conscious, metered breathing. These intervals demonstrate the healing power of a regular breathing pattern in which each breath is complete, full, uninterrupted by speech, and slow. Last, the technician will direct the patient to breathe consciously, but without the assistance of the metronome. This final interval will be the model for the patient’s further use of the tool at home. Finally, the technician will share her observations of the test with the patient and the patient will follow-up with one of the physicians as to what he/she learned and how well he/she is utilizing the tool.