(More) Heart Rate Variability
Heart rate variability (HRV) measures the time intervals between adjacent heart beats. When you sit down for the 3 minute reading in our office, the HRV instrument reads your pulse and the skin temperature of your hand. From this data, the computer is able analyze how your autonomic nervous system is functioning. By looking at both resilience and the balance between sympathetic (fight/flight) and parasympathetic (rest/digest) tone, this reliable, non-invasive, and quick scan provides some really important information about how you have been and are currently able to adapt to stress.
The autonomic nervous system (ANS) coordinates the vital functions of your body, such as heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, and sweating. The ANS has three branches, two of which are easily mapped to the spine: sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system is activated when we encounter actual or perceived danger - this is the fight/flight response we feel when distressed. This part of the ANS originates in the thoracic spine (where your ribs are). The parasympathetic nervous system regulates rest and repair and originates in the upper neck and lower back (sacrum).
HRV measures the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic tone. Like the gas and brake pedals in your car, both are important and neither should be activated all of the time. We often consider stress as having a negative connotation. What may be stressful for one person is energizing for another. I think it depends on the person and the context. Running for exercise because you want to is different than running for exercise because you are forced to, which is also different than running away from a bear. Eustress refers to “good stress” - activities which are taxing to the body and mind, but that contribute to health. Whether we consider an event or activity as eustress or distress depends largely on how well balanced the ANS is and how much energy is available to adapt.
When talking about the ANS, the energy available to adapt to stress is called resilience.
Resilience is the reserve energy in our bodies that allows us to prepare for, recover from, and adapt in the face of stress, adversity, trauma, and challenge.
Resilience varies based on the the environment and how adaptive and flexible your nervous system is. HRV measures the resilience of the ANS, which is why it is such a useful tool for chiropractic. Chiropractic facilitates the flexibility, adaptive capacity, and resilience in nervous system by directly addressing areas in the spine that are limiting the flow of energy between the brain and the body. Chiropractic is one of the ways you can positively influence your HRV. My 2021 blog post about HRV contains references and goes into more detail about this technology, as well as six ways to support the nervous system.
Two years and many scans later the most important things I have found both professionally and personally to improve HRV are meditation/contemplative practice, regular chiropractic care, and time in Nature. Our ability to adapt to the inevitable and increasing stressors that life presents depends on the tone and tension of the nervous system. HRV reflects our capacity to adapt to stress. Being able to measure this capacity is an invaluable tool. It provides a window into health and a way to track progress over time.
To learn more about this technology and how it relates to the work we do in the practice, click here.
Environmental Stressors
Each year an estimated 4.5 billion pounds of the herbicide and crop desiccant glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup) is deliberately sprayed on our home. It is water soluble, which means that in addition to being sprayed on the crops, it is absorbed into the soil, into the water table, and by extension, everything else. It acts on the shikimate pathway in plants, interrupting the synthesis of 3 essential amino acids (tryptophan, phenylalanine, and tyrosine). There are 9 essential amino acids, termed such because humans cannot produce them and need to obtain them from food. We make important hormones and neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, dopamine, and epinephrine, among many others from the 3 essential amino acids that this chemical blocks in plant biosynthesis. Even though human cells do not have this pathway, the bacteria in our gut do.
The EPA states that glyphosate is safe and there are “no risks of concern to human health from current uses of glyphosate.” On a related note, it took the EPA 30 years to identify, acknowledge, and then ban the use of the insecticide DDT owing to adverse environmental, wildlife, and human effects. One of the more interesting correlations with the end of the polio epidemic in the United States in the early 1960s other than the introduction of the Sabin and Salk vaccines, was the phasing out of DDT domestically. DDT was known to poison nerve tissue, specifically the anterior horn cells of the spinal cord, producing the same clinical presentation as paralytic polio. Correlation does not equal causation and there is always more than one reason for why a virus appears to “cause” serious and scary illness. It behoves us to consider a larger perspective: one that includes the impact of introducing significant quantities of toxic chemicals into the environment, directly or indirectly into our bodies.
The EPA position is an interesting one, since glyphosate is devastating to the human gut biome and damages the tight junctions of the cells that line the gut and the blood-brain barrier. The mucosal linings of our body and the microbes that symbiotically host us are two of the primary ways we maintain balance with the environment. They are cornerstones of our immune system. I believe we are seeing the cumulative impact of nearly 50 years of progressively increasing the use of chemicals that are toxic to water, soil, and the biological systems that maintain life on our planet. The mainstream conversation about climate change and greenhouse gas emissions has largely ignored the carbon capture and storage afforded by healthy soil. Perhaps more importantly, I think the terrestrial information substrates (e.g. mycelia and microflora) that know how to create and sustain life on this planet live in the soil.
We are not separate from nature. Ecosystem describes the relationship of living things to their environment; oikos from the Greek “house, or dwelling.” To continue on this course of chemical escalation in an hubristic attempt to control nature is not simply absurd, it is obviously and profoundly dangerous. Our ability to inhabit our planet in a healthy and meaningful way starts at home.
Things you can do:
Grow your own food
Buy local, organic, and regenerative
Don’t spray Roundup
Encourage your neighbors to not spray Roundup
Combining concentrated vinegar and epsom salt is great anti-“weed” method
Life to Years, Years to Life
The signs of life are evidence of the intelligence of life. All living things grow, repair, excrete, replicate/reproduce, and adapt. This is true on the macro scale of organisms and the micro scale of individual cells. In 2009, the Noble prize in medicine was awarded for the discovery and description of telomerase, the enzyme that maintains the length and integrity of chromosomes as they divide. This is a critical, though probably not the only, mechanism that regulates aging.
Aging is a potent reminder of the passage of time. Our bodies change over time and one of the ways these changes manifest is the shortening of our telomeres. Like everything, I think there are both quantitative and qualitative aspects to this. There is an innate desire to add years to life, to postpone biological aging, to keep our telomeres long. Yet this desire is incomplete without its complement, of adding life to years. The epigenetic influences that regulate how genes are expressed, which enzymes get activated, and which proteins our cells build reflect quality and tone more than amounts. These qualities are related to choices we make about how we spend our time, our energy, and our attention.
There is a principle in chiropractic - “there is no process that does not require time.” Sometimes we forget that biology unfolds at its own pace. An acorn does not become an oak overnight. Tissues heal at different speeds in response to injury, unraveling long-standing patterns of stress does not happen immediately, and the invitation to step just beyond ourselves is a step in the long walk of our lives. The instant perception changes, a new pattern becomes available, but the process of cultivating it requires both time and tending.
When we give ourselves the opportunity to look into, get to know, and practice new ways to be in our bodies, we find more space in which to respond and open up to life. This is the goal and the scope of chiropractic. Supporting the natural function of all of the body’s systems, without drugs, jabs, or surgery, we see miracles happen and the quality of life improve. To be clear, medical modalities have a time and a place. My point is that chiropractic offers something qualitatively different in both the principle and practice of helping people grow, age, and be well.
In the grand scheme, any time we have is bonus time. Here, heading into winter, I am again reminded of “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver.
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?