Heart Breath Mind: Conquer Stress, Build Resilience, and Perform at Your Peak

Slow and deep breathing does suppress sympathetic activity, but unless you do it systematically, it won’t strengthen the parasympathetic branch at your baseline state. That’s where the braking action happens, thanks to something called the baroreflex.

A need for control. Excessive amounts of change (anything from moving several times to watching one’s parents get divorced) or repeated traumas can leave a physiological imprint resulting in a sense of a lack of control.

WEEK 1 ACTION PLAN Measure your HRV four times this week, right after waking up. Mark your results on the homework tracking sheet on page 224. Try breathing at the six recommended breathing rates, and determine the one that feels best to you. This is your resonance frequency. You’ll know you’ve found it when your mind clears, your heart feels calm,

Meg’s ghost wasn’t her ex or the breakup. Her ghost originated, as is the case with many of my clients, from a traumatic experience in her earlier years. Her sudden flood of emotions was a purging of old, stuck, physiological arousal. Week by week, as Meg’s autonomic nervous system strengthened, the childhood energy sought to release itself.

High heart rate variability is associated with smooth, efficient prefrontal cortex activity and executive-function tasks including working memory and inhibitory control. This means that by increasing your heart rate variability, you improve your prefrontal lobe activity and with it your ability to self-regulate, inhibit negative thoughts, make obje

You can anticipate when your trigger stressors are most likely to occur—8 a.m. highway traffic; your Monday meeting with your boss; holiday dinners with extended family—and insert a Power 10 in the moments before. Think of it as a planned intervention.

Once you’re ramped up, though, it’s overly difficult for your physiology to recover. You’re driving a car that has no trouble reaching a high speed but is incapable of slowing down. This is true for most of us.

When we don’t let them go, negative emotions become ingrained in our sympathetic nervous system, locking us in a cycle of stress. Letting go doesn’t mean you need to forget your past; it means you allow your body to fully process the stress response associated with negative experiences and emotions, then release it.

Perfectionism or fear of disappointing others. This theme can stem from growing up in environments where receiving parental validation feels extremely important, as if one needed to perform well or exceed expectations to earn the parents’ attention.