Brainstem Digital Health Offers Paced Resonance Breathing Exercises
What’s in a digital health wearable that makes it useful to keep using it? The truth is that many people strap on their watches, glance at their heart rates, and marvel at how many steps they’d taken that day but do little else with them to enhance their health.
Is this all we can get out of a wearable? Research indicates we can do much more than that…
Brainstem Digital Health has been working toward building a wearable designed specifically for gathering information on the activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which has its roots in the human brainstem. The best proxy for ANS health is heart rate variability (HRV), a measure of the ANS balance acting specifically on the heart rate.
The ANS guides the activity of nearly every component of our internal organs, including the heart, lungs, GI tract, bladder, sweat glands, and sexual organs. Researchers have begun to understand that a healthy ANS means reduced stress on our organs, better immune function, and enhanced potential for better health, wellness, and longevity.
Brainstem Digital Health believes that any wearable so crucial to our health and wellness should not simply be a passive device we simply wear. An ideal wearable should be capable of allowing users to intervene in the activity of their own ANS function, shifting the balance toward improved health outcomes through activities like slow, paced breathing.
Brainstem Offers Enhanced Health with Resonance Breathing
Global research shows that resonance breathing enhances overall health, cognitive function, and mood. Resonance breathing involves breathing at a specific rate (generally 5-7 breaths per minute) to augment the natural flexibility of the heart, breathing, and blood pressure to react to changes in posture and activity. It’s been hypothesized to improve cardiovascular blood flow and oxygenation to all areas of the body.
When a person does this for 5 to 15 minutes per day, they can retrain the innate flexibility seen in children but generally lost as a person ages. This flexibility, called respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), is believed to conserve cardiac energy by reducing the heart rate while enhancing the exchange of gases in the resting person. Better gas exchange translates to more oxygen provided with greater efficiency.
Does it actually help improve health?
Brainstem has studied small groups of individuals to see how well resonance breathing affected perceptions of wellness and mood. Anecdotal reports have indicated that long COVID patients, many of whom live with chronic fatigue, have found benefit in using Brainstem’s wearable device for HRV-based, paced breathing exercises.
When individuals engaged in slow, paced breathing daily using heart rate variability feedback on the wearable’s mobile app, nearly every volunteer was able to attain decreases in resting heart rate. In most cases, reduced resting heart rate indicates improved autonomic nervous system balance and better physical/emotional health.
Resonance Breathing and Autonomic Nervous System Balance
Heart rate variability (HRV) is a measure of the variation in the time difference between successive heartbeats. It is also an excellent proxy for determining the balance between sympathetic “fight-or-flight” ANS activity and parasympathetic “rest and recover” ANS activity.
Research tells us that lower heart rates generally mean that sympathetic nervous activity is lessened, allowing for better recovery and reduced stress perception. The low-frequency wave component of the HRV commonly implies excessive sympathetic activity.
Brainstem Digital Health looked at the effects of paced breathing on heart rate and HRV. They were able to demonstrate that breathing exercises lower heart rate and simultaneously diminish ANS sympathetic stress response.
When you can use HRV as a digital biomarker and engage in the app’s daily biostimulation exercises, you can gain valuable feedback on your health status and improve its trajectory at the same time.
Resonance Breathing Is Easy
Paced breathing can be done for 5-15 minutes or more each day. The practice is enhanced by guided feedback that will eventually include audio guidance. Brainstem’s wearable and its easy-to-use mobile app can help you take your commitment to better health and track improvement in your ANS as you embark on your own individual wellness journey, regardless of age or current health issues.
