As you may remember from my April 27, 2009 article, “You Never Know”, I told you about how Elise and I met Howard Martin and Deborah Rozman, two of the founders and developers of HeartMath.
When Elise first mentioned HeartMath’s emWave Personal Stress Reliever®, I had no idea what she was talking about, and I assumed it was some new age gimmick or another. But when I met Howard and Deborah, that all changed – I was impressed and moved.
The emWave Personal Stress Reliever® is much like a heart monitor, and it measures a lot more than your pulse. It seems that your pulse is only one measure of your health and the health of your heart. Within each heartbeat, or pulse, you can measure the ‘smoothness’ of the beat. In other words, your heartbeat could display either as a very smooth rounded series of heartbeats or, if you are not relaxed, as a series of jagged ‘rough’ heartbeats.
While you may not be able to ‘feel’ the difference yourself, the health implications are fascinating. For example, when under stress, something our ancestors only dealt with in relatively short bursts and from time to time, our pulse becomes more jagged as our bodies prepare for ‘flight or fight.’ The body stops doing as much regular maintenance and produces chemicals that will increase energy and reaction times, like adrenaline.
Conversely, when your pulse is smooth and healthy, your body is free to perform maintenance, and your brain produces ‘feel good’ chemicals that further calm you and to your sense of well being.
This probably worked well when we experienced both stress and calm in relatively even amounts — however, today life is different. Many people spend most or all of their lives in some kind of stress preventing their bodies from doing regular maintenance and boosting the immune system.
We already know that living with a constant infusion of adrenaline or other stress-induced chemicals is not a great deal but most of us don’t know how to stop living this way.
The HeartMath technology gives you a quick, simply and easy way to measure the ‘smoothness’ of your pulse and helps you achieve greater and great relaxation.
Skeptical about such things, I tried out an emWave device and was surprised with how accurately it reflected my thoughts and stress levels while I had the device clipped to my ear. They have also introduced a hand-held model.
In a panel discussion about HeartMath and emWave, Alex Mandossian put it in as simple and straight forward words possible, “When you measure something, it tends to improve.” By giving people clear strategies to relax their bodies and the heart, and the tools to measure their progress, HearthMath is doing excellent work and I recommend that you look into their work. http://www.heartmath.com/