Autonomic Nervous System
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Get feedback on your state
Now it’s scientifically proven that the heart can affect the mind. There are subtle changes in our bodies that affect and reflect our mental state constantly. Biofeedback is one way to become aware of and monitor these changes. Through this feedback, participants can then interpret visible or aural cues for their current and shifting psychological and physiological state. Biofeedback has given me a whole new way of looking at my heart and its emotional well-being.
Autonomic Nervous System • Brain • Education • Heart Rate Variability • HeartMath • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Work stress ‘changes your body’
A stressful job has a direct biological impact on the body, raising the risk of heart disease, research has indicated.
The study reported in the European Heart Journal focused on more than 10,000 British civil servants. Those under 50 who said their work was stressful were nearly 70% more likely to develop heart disease than the stress-free.
Article
European Society of Cardiology press release
Autonomic Nervous System • Cardiovascular Health • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
New Study Raises Concerns about Current Test-Taking Requirements
There’s no doubt that today students are under intense pressure to perform academically, but at what cost? The Institute of HeartMath and Claremont Graduate University released a new study that depicts the high levels of anxiety students are shouldering due to the pressure to excel intellectually. Nearly two-thirds of the high school students who participated in the study reported being affected by test anxiety. The study underscores the detrimental impact of test anxiety on academic performance. Based on their findings, researchers say that students’ high levels of anxiety may jeopardize NCLB assessment validity and could be compromising testing results.
Anxiety • Autonomic Nervous System • Brain • Children • Cognition • Education • Heart Rate Variability • HeartMath • Memory • Productivity/Performance • Psychology • Stress • Teenagers • (0) Comments • Permalink
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Reducing Stress In Order To Manage Risk Factors Linked To Adverse Cardiovascular Outcomes
A Review in The Lancet stresses the value of a healthy lifestyle to reduce stress so as to manage risk factors linked with undesirable cardiovascular outcomes. Dr Daniel Brotman, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, MD, USA and team examined documents published during the period 1990 - 2006. “Since antiquity, people have been intuitively aware of the connection between the heart and emotional stress,” they explained.
Autonomic Nervous System • Cardiovascular Health • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Is Biofeedback in Games the Next Next-Gen?
Imagine if your heart beat or other physiological signs from your body had a direct impact on the gameplay in your favorite games. Brett Skogen, President of Beijing-based Digital Entertainment, would like to make biofeedback in gaming a reality.
Autonomic Nervous System • Brain • Creativity/Innovation • Heart Rate Variability • Productivity/Performance • Stress • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Biofeedback Reinvented - New Discoveries Show that the Heart Pulses Messages that Reveal Feelings
HeartMath essentially reinvented biofeedback in 1999 when they introduced the first affordable consumer stress-reduction product using their patented heart rhythm feedback. Their focus on heart rhythm feedback provided a refreshing departure from conventional biofeedback practices, and has since been adopted by more than ten thousand health professionals worldwide as an effective and invaluable tool for patients suffering from stress-related issues. Internationally respected for their research-based stress solutions, HeartMath peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated the critical link between emotions, heart function, and cognitive performance.
ADHD • Anger • Anxiety • Appreciation • Autonomic Nervous System • Brain • Cardiovascular Health • Cognition • Creativity/Innovation • Education • Emotions • Happiness • Heart Rate Variability • HeartMath • Hypertension • Pain • Productivity/Performance • Psychology • PTSD • Science • Stress • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink
Stress response tied to kids’ behavior problems
A combination of nature and nurture may make some children more likely to develop behavioral problems, new research suggests. In a study of 138 children, researchers found that it wasn’t only the children’s exposure to stress, but their bodies’ reactions to the stress, that affected their future behavior. Young children who had both a stressful home life and an exaggerated nervous system response to stress were more likely than their peers to develop behavioral problems over the next six years.
Autonomic Nervous System • Children • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink
Sunday, April 29, 2007
What the Heart Knows
Dr. Bruce H. Lipton has done an elegant job of showing how the dogma of genetic determinism is just that – dogma. He has shown that our genes and cells respond to signals from outside the cells, including the hormonal and energetic messages that reflect our emotional, mental and spiritual experiences. Lipton and others’ research reveals that rather than being determined by our genes, we actually are continually changing our genes by what we choose to think, feel and do. Such choices are constantly being genetically encoded in our brain and energetic structures.
Autonomic Nervous System • Cardiovascular Health • Emotions • HeartMath • Intuition • (0) Comments • Permalink
Sunday, April 22, 2007
HeartMath’s emWave Personal Stress Reliever
Our emWave Personal Stress Reliever is on sale until the end of the April for $20.00 off. If you’re interested in realtime stress reduction and peak performance, please take a look at the two-minute demo.
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Saturday, January 20, 2007
The Flavor Of Memories
Two crucial facts that neurologists have come to understand in the past few years about the workings of human memory--facts that have important implications for the treatment of a variety of mental disorders, from post-traumatic stress to obsessive-compulsive disorder. The first is that, despite its movie-like clarity, my memory of J.F.K.’s assassination is almost certainly wrong in some details, and maybe even some significant ones. That’s because I’m not simply calling up the original memory laid down in November 1963. I’m recalling the last time I thought about it. Each time we retrieve and re-store a memory, it can be subtly altered by all sorts of factors. What goes back into our brains is like the new version of a text document, overwriting the old. The second fact: memory and emotion are intimately linked biochemically, with hormones like adrenaline actively involved in forming the neurological patterns we call memories.
9/11 • Amygdala • Anger • Anxiety • Autonomic Nervous System • Brain • Cognition • Emotions • Hormones • Memory • Mood • Panic • Psychology • PTSD • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink
Friday, January 12, 2007
Horse Heart Coherence May Be Key To Non-invasive Stress Detection
A horse’s heart rhythms reflect their emotional state and can respond to the emotional state of a nearby human, according to a pilot study conducted by Alliant International University Professor Ellen Gehrke and the Institute of HeartMath. When in contact, a horse’s heart rate may mirror a human’s emotions, signifying a close unspoken form of communication between man and beast.
Autonomic Nervous System • Heart Rate Variability • HeartMath • Mood • Nature • Psychology • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
An Appreciative Heart is Good Medicine
Psychologists once maintained that emotions were purely mental expressions generated by the brain alone. We now know that this is not true — emotions have as much to do with the heart and body as they do with the brain. Of the bodily organs, the heart plays a particularly important role in our emotional experience. The experience of an emotion results from the brain, heart, and body acting in concert. The Institute of HeartMath, a research center dedicated to the study of the heart and the physiology of emotions, has conducted numerous studies identifying the relationship between emotions and the heart. A number of their studies have provided new insight into understanding how the activity of the heart is indeed linked to our emotions and our health, vitality and well-being.
Anger • Appreciation • Autonomic Nervous System • Brain • Depression • Emotions • Heart Rate Variability • HeartMath • Hormones • Immune System • Optimism • Productivity/Performance • Psychology • Science • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Why We Worry About The Things We Shouldn’t… …And Ignore The Things We Should
Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we’d get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong. We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the U.S., but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn’t) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.
Amygdala • Anxiety • Autonomic Nervous System • Brain • Emotions • Happiness • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Relaxation gadgets and software have their pluses and minuses
It’s a paradox: The more you try to relax, the less relaxed you become. The truth was right there on the screen, as I put the leading consumer biofeedback devices through their paces. Here’s what I learned.
Autonomic Nervous System • HeartMath • Stress • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Stress Accelerates AIDS Progression and Undermines Anti-HIV Drugs
UCLA AIDS Institute research reveals that stress enables HIV to spread more quickly in infected persons and prevents antiretroviral drugs from restoring immune system function. The UCLA study is the first to pinpoint the molecular mechanisms linking stress and HIV infection. The higher the man’s stress level, the less he responded to the antiretroviral drugs. In fact, the average decline in viral load dropped more than 40 times for men with low ANS activity - yet less than 10 times for men with high ANS activity.
Autonomic Nervous System • Immune System • Stress • (0) Comments • Permalink