Heart Rate Variability

We are very pleased to offer you biofeedback training for your heart rate variability (HRV) coherence. Our HRV biofeedback training helps teach you how to shift from stress and dysregulation to self-regulation, balance and resilience thereby helping the rehabilitation of your pelvic condition. This is a powerful tool to help your overall wellbeing and, in turn, to facilitate recovery from your pelvic health problem.  To learn more, contact us here.  

What prompted us to offer HRV coherence biofeedback training? The heart rate variability biofeedback rehabilitation method helps you learn to bring balance to your body’s systems. This is mind/body care and something we offer to provide you with holistic and comprehensive rehabilitative treatments to facilitate your pelvic recovery. Many of our patients have some level of autonomic nervous system imbalance. The autonomic nervous system is sort-of like your gas and brakes of your car. You have the sympathetic portion that would be your accelerator, speeding you up, and your parasympathetic portion which would be your brakes, slowing you down. Interestingly, in the bladder, the parasympathetic nervous system facilitates bladder emptying while the sympathetic helps your bladder store urine. With years of experience, living in our fast-paced American society, treating individuals with pelvic floor dysfunction and attending professional pelvic pain and urinary control conferences, we see our patients are commonly imbalanced in their autonomic nervous system. Symptoms of this can include constipation, diarrhea, anxiety, stress, poor sleep, urinary urgency, rapid heart rate, anger, uncontrolled mood and is also a factor in chronic pain, where we might also see sweating and irregular heart rate. With heart rate variability training we help you learn to shift your body towards coherence, such that you feel more like yourself because your brain and body are in better alignment, and you may find you gain skills to improve your pelvic problem.

What is heart rate variability?

In short, it is the timing between heartbeats, beat-to-beat variations that you want and need. A healthy heart will have more variability in the timing between heartbeats. The heart historically was thought to be like a metronome, keeping steady, regular beats, but this was incorrect presumptions; a healthy heart actually has considerable variability, measured in milliseconds, with the time interval between consecutive heartbeats changing continuously. If your heartbeats have no variability, with a constant thump, thump, thump, thump, you actually have less parasympathetic nervous system relaxation occurring between beats. This is because the normal heart rate is the synergistic activity of the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system accelerates our heart rate and the parasympathetic serves to decelerate it. These two nervous system branches are continuously maintaining our heart activity, keeping it in optimal rhythm and responding to stimuli. We use leading software in our biofeedback training to analyze your heart rate variability and to teach you how to improve it. Using HRV is a window into the activity, balance and function of your autonomic nervous system. Teaching you to optimize your HRV coherence can have profound effects on your pelvic condition, mood, mind and body. If you are looking to learn meaningful skills to enhance your wellbeing and rehabilitate your pelvis, we offer HRV coherence training for you.  Reach out to request an appointment here or call us at (616) 516-4334.