HOW I TRACKED MY HEART RATE VARIABILITY (HRV)

I started monitoring my HRV during lockdown in May. At first I used a Wahoo Tickr cheststrap heart monitor, moving on to a more convenient finger pulse reader called CorSense. For consistency, I take my morning HRV reading as soon as I wake up, which involves pairing one of these devices to an app on my phone called Elite HRV and sitting still for two minutes. Afterwards, I am encouraged to log exercise, sleep, mood, soreness, energy levels, plus anything else I think might be relevant.

For HRV geeks, the app is packed with mysterious sounding data such as ‘RMSSD’ and ‘HF Peak’. I keep things simple, and only pay attention to my ‘morning readiness’ scores of 1 to 10, along with my HRV. This is presented with a bar showing my balance between sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system activity and parasympathetic (rest and digest). If I’m in the green zone in the middle, I’m good.

A month in, I started using an Oura ring, too, which takes my HRV while I sleep. The readings are an average from my entire night’s sleep, and are dramatically lower than my morning HRV scores, although they largely rise and fall over time in unison with my morning readings. The Oura app doesn’t give as much befuddling detail and you don’t have to fiddle about in the mornings.

During my time of tracking my HRV, a glass or two of wine didn’t seem to have an effect. Nor did switching from my regular tea to coffee in the the morning. A bad night’s sleep, on the other hand, was an HRV disaster, as were times of stress or overwhelm. In the days before my daughter’s birthday outing, with work deadlines either side, no childcare and a house guest to accommodate, my HRV plummeted. A gradual decrease in weekly averages could be seen as lockdown blurred into the summer holidays, and my patience with the pandemic restrictions took a hit.