Learn practical solutions for expanding heart connections, accelerating personal growth and transforming stress into greater energy, better health and a more fulfilling life.
The researchers who conducted a recently published study using a short breathing protocol to measure heart rate variability (HRV) in a large group of Dutch workers say it’s the first of its kind.
"This is the first study," the researchers explained, "to explore a 1-minute paced deep-breathing HRV protocol as an objective screening measure for multiple future health issues in a working population."
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Thoughts from this year’s Humanitarian Heart Award recipients:
“I live everyday focused on others’ healing journey and living the quote from Albert Einstein "only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”
“My most heartfelt wish for the planet is that we … fulfill our obligation to take care of the whole Earth, including plants, animals and the atmosphere, instead of just looking out for the next way to make a dollar.”
Continue reading“… it’s the heart that one needs to be educated on, the heart that can bring emotions into alignment, the heart that will take your learning, your community’s learning, our planet’s learning to the next level and beyond.”
Editor’s note – “Coherence is the state when the heart, mind and emotions are in energetic alignment and cooperation. It is a state that builds resiliency – personal energy is accumulated, not wasted, – leaving more energy to manifest intentions and harmonious outcomes.”
Know someone about to begin or continue college this fall? Naturally, you’ll want to offer encouragement and helpful advice for coping and succeeding in what is sure to be one of the more stressful ventures of his or her life. Think coherence. Even better, think quick coherence:
A newly published study assessing the efficacy of HeartMath’s Quick Coherence Technique® (QCT) found significant improvements in a group of students’ heart-coherence levels, as measured by heart rate variability (HRV). Study participants were undergraduates at the Universiti Putra Maylasia, in Pahang, Malaysia.
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From time to time, we all need to take pause, a brief stillness, a moment to review "our initial reaction so we can move to the place where a calm, thoughtful response is born." – L.R. Knost
Through hindsight, we often realize how much stress we could have prevented by pausing to reconsider our choices before taking action. Many of us have learned this lesson many times over: for example, sometimes our heart nudges us to take a pause before releasing an angered response to an e-mail and we don’t listen. We mechanically press send and often second-guess ourselves the minute we click the mouse.
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Did you know geomagnetic and solar activity can affect your autonomic nervous system (ANS), which controls your breathing, heartbeat and digestive processes? It’s true: A recently published long-term study whose researchers included HeartMath Institute’s Rollin McCraty and Mike Atkinson, reached that conclusion.
"These findings," the study states, "support the hypothesis that these energetic environmental factors act as energy sources that outplay in different ways depending on an individual’s health status and maturity level and capacity of self-regulation."
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Heart humility – that is, knowing who we truly are and accepting our strengths with gratitude, our limitations without judgment and the world around us with appreciation – is a powerful and attainable quality. Heart humility can help us to walk through this world with confidence, integrity and wisdom.
Heart humility does not require reserve or timid postures in our interactions with others, but rather a quietness in our being, a quiet knowingness of who we are. Heart humility is being honest with ourselves and others, and expressing our gratitude and respect for all involved.
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Being out of sorts, or off our game because of Illness or injury, anger or anxiety or when we become stressed out and overwhelmed can cause deterioration in our personal coherence levels. Likewise, dysfunction within a group – large or small – because of animosity, jealousy, judgment or other negative conditions can signal a weakening of social coherence and, ultimately, lead to a group’s success or failure.
"Social coherence," writes HeartMath Institute Director of Research Rollin McCraty, "relates to the harmonious alignment between couples or pairs, family units, small groups, or larger organizations in which a network of relationships exists among individuals who share common interests and objectives." McCraty, one of today’s foremost researchers of coherence and heart rate variability, was writing for the October issue of the journal, Frontiers in Public Health.
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"All biological systems on Earth are exposed to an external and internal environment of fluctuating invisible magnetic fields of a wide range of frequencies. These fields can affect virtually every cell and circuit to a greater or lesser degree." – Synchronization of Human Autonomic Nervous System Rhythms with Geomagnetic Activity in Human Subjects, a newly published study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
A research team that conducted the study cited above and published this month added further evidence to the scientific community’s understanding of how human autonomic nervous systems respond to environment influences. In this study, those influences resulted from, among other factors, changes in solar and geomagnetic activity, cosmic rays and the frequencies known as the Schumann resonances.
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Everyone loves that warm heart feeling they get when they do something kind for another. It's wonderful, right? Did you know kind acts – even secret ones – can do wonders for your physical, mental and emotional health? And there’s another curious thing about kindness: It’s uniquely contagious, kindness researchers say.
A study conducted among students at the University of British Columbia found that performing acts of kindness can help lower people's social anxiety, which often leads to negative self-beliefs and behaviors.
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