[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness. Please consider the information in this podcast for your informational use and not medical advice. Please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode. Heart Rate Variability Podcast is a production of Optimal LLC and Optimal HRV Check. Check us
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Welcome, friends, to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. I am back here with my dear friend, Dr. Ina Hazan. Dr. Hazan, it's been a while since we've had you on the show, so I'm so excited to have you back. We got some exciting news to share with the Optimal HRV app, but even if you're not a customer to Optimal hrv, stay tuned. I probably a lot of you have heard in the talk on this podcast before. If you're not, if you're not familiar with her and her work, you're in for a treat. So, Ina, just in case we have a listener that may not have seen one of your previous episodes, let's just start out with just a quick introduction of yourself.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Sure thing. Thank you, Matt. Always so good to be on screen with you. So my name is Ida Hasdan. I'm a clinical health and performance psychologist. I've been in the field of biofeedb and HRV biofeedback in particular for over 20 years.
I teach at Harvard Medical School and I am a chief science officer@optimal HRV and also have a group practice in downtown Boston. So doing a lot of this, you.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Keep busy, my friend. That's for sure.
Well, I'm really excited because we were chatting about, okay, where should we focus the next development effort into our app? And you brought up child residence frequency assessment. And my initial response is, well, we already got an assessment there. Why do we need a child specific. And then like most things with heart rate variability biofeedback, you gave me a quick good education on why we did need it. But I would like to just in case we may have a new user who's not familiar with residence frequency and residence frequency assessment. Why don't we define our variables before we dive into why children need a separate assessment? So let's just approach the topic generally to begin.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Sure thing. So resonance frequency breathing is the kind of breath that will optimize our HRV biofeedback training and, you know, make the time that we spend on this as efficient as possible.
So let's go back a little bit and Just talk about exactly what that is and how this works. Resonance is a physics concept, right? It's not unique to the cardiovascular system or to human beings.
Resonance refers to an oscillating system with two parts to it, where when one part stimulates the other, you produce maximum oscillations in that part.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: Isn't there a child on a swing or something maybe too?
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I am going to. I have two few ways to show this. So we are. You know, you can think of this as a pendulum. And you know, you can hit that pendulum in a number of different ways, right? And it's going to swing. You know, you can hit it just kind of once and it's going to go crazy and then stop. You can hit it with, you know, just little tiny pats and it's going to go up just a tiny bit. Or you can figure out a way of hitting that pendulum in these regular ways to produce maximum oscillations of the pendulum.
And then you can translate that into a child swing, especially since we're talking child resonance frequency. That just makes so much more sense.
If you've ever pushed the child in a swing again, you know that you can push that swing in a bunch of different ways. As you have the child sitting there, you can push with a lot of force and just once. And that swing goes up a lot, kind of hits the top bar and kind of tumbles down. And, you know, the child is not thrilled with you at all. Ugh, no, this is. This is no good.
And then you can also push the swing with just, you know, short little bursts, just a little, you know, little taps, and the swing is gonna go up just a tiny bit and come right back down. And again, the child is not thrilled with you because this is boring. This is just not what I want at all. Until you find a way of pushing that swing in these regular, smooth ways so that when you push, the swing goes up as much as possible, but very smoothly. You know, it does not hit the top bar. It just kind of comes down again nicely and smoothly, and then you push it again and it goes up nice and smooth, comes back down, etc, and then you have a very happy child who never wants to get off that swing.
That is what we're going for. You know, the breath is you pushing a swing or swinging that pendulum, and the heart is the child on the swing or the pendulum itself, that oscillating system with two parts to it where the breath stimulates the heart rate, or the two parts of this oscillating system is the breath and the heart rate. The breath drives the heart rate. When we breathe in, the heart rate goes up. When we breathe out, the heart rate goes.
And in order to produce these maximum oscillations of the heart rate, maximum heart rate variability at the time of your training, we want to figure out just how to stimulate the heart rate. What is the ideal pace, what is the ideal rate? So that when you breathe in, the heart rate goes up as much as possible and as you breathe out, heart rate goes down as much as possible. That is resonance frequency breathing.
That rate is going to be different for most people. For adults it's somewhere between three and a half and seven.
And the reason we need a separate one for the kids is because kids breathe faster so their residence frequency breathing rate is going to be faster as well. And that three and a half to seven is not going to do for most kids.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: I'd love to know what's, what's behind you, you know, do, is it just a set point like the younger? Because I know learning from you, at least we, the research is kind of suggesting or showing that like once you hit 18, your, your resonance frequency breathing rate is set kind of throughout your life. Even though I think we both have, I wonder like question marks about that. But let's follow what the research is telling us right now until we learn otherwise. So I'm curious what' going on with the, the developing nervous system where residents frequency breathing rate to help, you know, get into the pendulum swinging? What's going on with the young person that we're seeing higher rates? Is it just that they take more breasts per minute growing up?
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Well, they do, but that's actually not the reason why kids have faster resonance frequency breathing rates.
Now a little disclaimer. There is still a lot we don't know about this. You know Matt, as you were alluding to at this point, it from what we know, once you've hit your grown up height, once you're no longer growing, your residence frequency shouldn't change. There are some, there is some evidence, you know, some anecdotal, you know, a little bit of research evidence suggesting that maybe that's the case. So we're going to keep an open mind and for now the best that we can tell, your resonance frequency stays the same once you've hit your grownup height. But you know, it, it that may be different. So that height is the one determinant that we know of that is strongly correlated with your resonance frequency. You know, we've looked at, you know, Things like, you know, age and gender, you know, all sorts of things, all sorts of characterist of our physiology. None of those seem to correlate with your resonance frequency, except for height. And that has to do with the length of your blood vessels. The taller you are, the longer your blood vessels. And that's why you have a varying resonance frequency depending on height. Again, if we come back to this pendulum, if I have my pendulum on a very short little leash, I have to stimulate it pretty frequently in order for it to go up, you know, as much as it possibly can on that short little leash. If, and then if I give that leash a longer, if I make the leash longer, then I don't have to stimulate it as often in order for the pendulum to go up and down as much as possible. Right. So that's kind of the best analogy we have for resonance frequency. Longer blood vessels, it equate to longer leash on your pendulum. And we don't need to breathe as frequently in order to stimulate the heart. Of course, kids are shorter, and not only do they just naturally breathe faster, but shorter, they also have shorter blood vessels and they need a faster breathing rate in order to stimulate their hearts in that optimal way. The younger the child, presumably the shorter they are, the faster their resonance frequency rate is going to be. This is not a perfect correlation, this is not a one to one, but it's a pretty strong correlation correlation with taller people having lower resonance frequency and shorter people having higher resonance frequency.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Awesome. And so, you know, as we integrated, you know, the science into the app, I know we have like different stages of development where we're tracking and suggesting, you know, every, every couple years or a few years or so to retake that. And, and I love that as, as someone gets taller, you know, so maybe a growth spurt could be also a good reason to reaffirm. But for those that may not be familiar, what are we? Okay, so we get resonance frequency, breathing rate. What do we do with that? You know, and especially I think from a. I'd love to, if you have any insight of working with children specifically that you and your colleagues have done, like, you know, it's one thing to think about, you know, somebody like me who's 50 years old that knows he should breathe. But, you know, why is it important to get children practicing? And I'd love just any strategies that our listeners might benefit from as well.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Well, the why, you know, the younger we can get kids into some of these, you know, really healthy beneficial habits, the more likely they are to stick with them. It's just something that becomes a part of their life now. I don't, you know, clinically I don't work with kids, you know, kind of, you know, teenagers now. But you know, I have kids of my. And you know they have, it's just inevitable. They've had to, you know, practice with me and you know, do all the little tricks that I think are going to be helpful. And you know, kids just learn so much faster and easier than adults.
Another reason to get them started early. They learn it's easier for them to learn this and it becomes part of their habit and then it's just something that they do. Right. It's kind of becomes ingrained in, in what they do. You know, 11 year old daughter, for example, just this is part of her bedtime routine. You know, she does her HRV training, you know, sends me a little screenshot of how she did and you know, that's, it's just normal and it makes it so much easier. You know, she doesn't have to really think about it. It's not do I have time for this? It's just kind of part of what she does. So getting kids started earlier will make it so much easier for them to stick with it. And who can't benefit from HIV biofeedback? I really can't think of a person who couldn't. Right. You know, certainly there, sometimes there are specific reasons why we prescribe HIV biofeedback. Maybe somebody has headaches or pain or suffers from anxiety or depression, things like that.
And that's often, that's often a reason to engage in HRV biofeedback. But you don't have to have something specific that you are working on. You can just to do HRV biofeedback in order to do better in life for you know, in any arena, in any area. It just helps all of us because of course the foundation of HRV or HRV serves rather as a foundation for self regulation and resilience and who couldn't use a little more of that? Right. So it just, it just makes sense to me.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Especially in a time just I think all of our listeners will be aware, especially here in the United States, you know, just the almost epidemic of childhood mental health anxiety.
I know my wife sees this every day in her work, you know, with second graders and talking to middle school, high school teachers as well. There's just a lot of concern about the mental health of our youth and you know, to provide folks with a child specific tool and to support some of the researchers we're working with. It's just really exciting to get that out to the world as a possible solution for folks to help out. May not be the only strategy, but could be a really useful one for managing just the stress that we're all going through, through this period of history right now with folks.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. It just strengthens our ability to rise to whatever challenges come. Come our way. Yeah.
[00:14:53] Speaker A: I would love to ask you kind of, you know, I think children bring up a really good opportunity to talk about this, but I. I'm also finding myself really trying to get adults to focus on it as well. So it can be kind of a more generalized question. You know, I know in the app, we do, you know, around seven, you know, eight breaths, you know, depending on what we're assessing, two breaths per minute. You take a break after. You can take a break after each breath. But I'd love to talk about maybe some best practices around getting a good residence frequency assessment, because we give breaks, but that break could just be just taking a few. Just normal breaths and then starting again. Or you could jump on the treadmill and run 13 miles. And obviously, I know one we support, one we don't. But when you think about children who may, you know, attention span even 14 minutes sitting still, you know, could be difficult just for whatever human, Whatever nervous system you have, what are maybe some best practices people can think about for their own resonance frequency assessment? And if they're doing it with a child with maybe more of a limited attention span, how can we get the best data possible so we know we're giving them their resonance frequency breathing rate?
[00:16:20] Speaker B: Great question. So, for one thing, whatever HRV measuring device you're using with kids, it's really important that it's as resistant to movement artifact as possible.
So, you know, it could be a chest strap. Then, you know, wiggly children are, you know, gonna. There's gonna be a lot less artifact if the HRV device is on the chest. Or it can be an armband that goes on the top of the arm. So the optimal HRV reader, it can go in the lower arm. It can go. It can also go in the upper arm. For the HRV assessment, I very much encourage people, adults, kids, put it on the upper arm, because that one is not going to move. If we're moving our fingers, moving our hands, it can produce artifact in the lower arm, but the upper arm is going to be more stable.
Having the plethysma graph on the finger, especially for kids, is problematic because they're just so much more likely to move and wiggle and you're not going to get good data. So the chest or the top of the arm is, is the best.
And each breathing rate does go on for two minutes. And you know, with, you know, whatever, whatever way you're using to assess this optimal just automatically stops and gives you a little break. You know, if you're doing this on your own, you can just, you know, build in a little bit of, a little bit of a break.
One thing I would say, don't make that break very long because we are looking at HRV in relative terms. All right? So we're going from, you know, let's say, you know, four and a half to seven breaths per minute for you know, for teenagers, like you know, the 13 to 15 year olds, or we might be going from, you know, 6 to 9 for like the 9 to 12 year olds.
And we're going to be looking at which breathing rate produces optimal, you know, the highest heart durability, specifically highest low frequency power and highest maxman heart rate.
Day to day. These parameters differ. Right. So if you do half of your assessment, you know, today and leave half for tomorrow, that's not going to be an accurate way of doing it because you're so much would have happened between today and tomorrow. Your HRV is just going to change. You know, it's this, you're not getting kind of absolute numbers here when you determine your resonance frequency. The way you do it is by comparing one breathing rate to another and what HRV metrics you get for each breathing rate. So it needs to happen when your nervous system is in approximately stable state so you can take a break. If this is a kid who is going to have a hard time focusing for more than a couple of minutes at a time, you can have them move around just gently, I would say, you know, don't have them go for a run or do jumping jacks because again, that will change the state of your nervous system. But you know, they can, you know, wiggle around a little bit or just, you know, talk, you know, about something.
So give them, give them a little break. I think that's an excellent idea. Then do two minutes at a time with like, you know, maybe a minute break in between, something like that. A couple minutes break in between should be, should be fine. You know, if, if the child can focus for a little longer, then go through as much as you can and then do a little bit of a break. You can certainly tailor this to the needs of the individual child or adult. But just keeping in mind that it's not a good idea to leave long periods of time between breathing rates.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Yeah. And I would just. This is kind of from the field of working with folks to go through resonance frequency. So I'd love to, to get your opinion, but I get the question from time to time is, you know, I got my resonance frequency, but I just can't feel comfortable. And now that we got optimal zone scale, I'm having really trouble getting into optimal zone at resonance frequency breathing rate. You know, I do encourage people like those are kind of my markers. And then I talk to them about, hey, when you took your resonance frequency, you know, where it was a kind of an average day, were you in a, you know, maybe not calm state, but a normal kind of looking for normal, you know, pieces of this. So just really encouraging some people, plus you may have been practicing paced breathing now for a month or so that if you, if it doesn't feel right to you, take the assessment again. You know, that it could be. We know with any assessment, whether that's you're writing answers down on a paper or anything else, could be a lot of things contributing to that, that end result. We're again following the science and the science tells us once we hit like, you know, adulthood, it's not going to change.
However, you know, make. If you don't feel like your residence frequency is working with you, I've been encouraging and finding it useful maybe, maybe a month or six weeks out to just take it again and see what, what the difference is between that. Just kind of wonder if you have any other markers that people may have just got skewed one way or the other in that initial assessment.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, things go wrong. Right. Especially with an app where you don't see the background data and you can't go, oh, look, there was artifact. I moved and something got in the way.
Optimal does have built in artifacting, which is great.
So we have some level of certainty that, you know, sudden movements get, get taken out and these, you know, big operations are not going to influence the outcome. But, you know, you just never know. So there could be just, you know, measurement measurement error.
From what we can tell the test, retest reliability for resonance frequency assessments is approximately 75%. Approximately. Right. So even under the best circumstances, you know, three quarters of the time, you know, we get it right and a quarter of the time we don't.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: So if you've been practicing resonance frequency breathing for a few weeks and it's just not feeling right, Absolutely. Take it again. I mean, I Don't see why you couldn't take it again, just to make sure, because there is a quarter of the time and we're not entirely sure what that quarter is attributed to. Most likely measurement issues, maybe not being very comfortable with the breathing when you take the assessment and that influences your results.
There may be something else that we have not figured out yet. So I think it's a good idea.
And also do remember that just because your resonance frequency breathing rate does not feel very comfortable initially does not mean it's wrong.
Because most of us typically breathe somewhere between 12 to 16, 17, 18 breaths per minute. And resonance frequency is seven breaths or lower. If you normally breathe safety, 15 breaths per minute. And then your resonance frequency is determined to be at three and a half. That's gonna be. That's a pretty steep change there. So you may not feel entirely comfortable right away. Give yourself a little bit of time. What I would suggest is maybe just practice, you know, without. Without a measurement at all and not to put that pressure on yourself. Just do some mindful breathing, focus on slowing down. Maybe if you're using optimal hrv, do the pacer without any tracking, without optim measurements, you know, just. Just for the sake of practice, like, and allowing your breath to follow the pacer, letting go of the struggle, letting go of the need to. For your breath to do something very specific.
And again, just give yourself a little bit of time. That said, you know, if it's been several weeks and it's just not getting better, why not retake it, just in case?
[00:24:34] Speaker A: And I think one of the things you mentioned that I know we suggest people do through our onboarding process is if you're not, you know, if you don't do any paced breathing or you've never done any paced breathing, give yourself a few days of practice. I love thinking about my HRV biofeedback as training. Right? Because we don't want people breathing at your resident. Hear me, folks, don't breathe at Your residence frequency 24, 7.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: No, no, no.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: That's not what it's for. It's not useful, could be harmful. Don't do it. It's your training rate. And so, you know, I think it's a good way. I do encourage you building up kind of a skill set with pace, breathing and residence frequency. Some people may be able to jump on, download the app, jump on, they can get a really good assessment. But give your. And I assume you would agree with me that the six breaths per minute is probably a good place to start with the pacer without tracking anything just to get used to it and onboarding process. We start with two minutes and go up for a few days before we have you do the residence frequency assessment.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. So for an adult, you know, six breaths per minute is a good place just to, just to do some practice. Don't over practice so that you don't get too used to it. What if your resonance frequency is three and a half? Right. You don't want to get too used to this. Exactly. But do give yourself that time to get comfortable with slow breathing. Now for kids, you know, their resonance frequency of course is higher so they would be practicing, you know, at slightly higher rates. So you know, for, you know, for you know, like a 13 to 15 year old, they may, they could actually give it a try at six breaths per minute, you know as well because that's going to be close enough or maybe like six and a half or seven.
For like nine to 12 year olds it's a practice more like at, you know, seven and a half, something like that. Maybe eight. And for five to eight year olds maybe practice at, you know, eight and a half.
[00:26:30] Speaker A: Beautiful. And we're probably kind of looking at the middle of the range for folks that might, might do this a week or so from now. Like look at their, look at the resident's frequency assessment for the range of the child you're going to do is probably the middle one in there is probably a decent, you know, thing for people to remember to practice at that rate initially for the children.
[00:26:51] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. And let me also say a word with the age, you know, where it makes sense to start this, you know, our resident frequency assessment on optimal HIV starts at 5, which in my experience is about the minimum age that makes sense to have the kids actually like using the PACER and using the app. I think prior to that you can absolutely, if you have younger kids, absolutely do breathing practices with them, I think it's great, you know, start learning, you know, slower breathing, you know, what it means, how it can help, et cetera. It's great. But I probably wouldn't put, you know, a three or four year old, you know, on the app and put them in front of the pacer. That's not, may not go very well. And there are plenty of five and six year olds for whom this is not going to work either. Right. So you know, you know your child or you know, if you are a therapist, you know, see if this works for the child that you are working with. This is by no means a hard and fast rule Some kids just need to mature a little bit before they can go through the whole process rather than just practicing breathing. But I think starting age of 5, there's enough kids who can do this and you can get them started. And others are going to wait until they're a little bit older.
[00:28:10] Speaker A: Absolutely. Great point. And just so for the optimal users out there, you know, you don't have to buy another reader for this. You can use the same reader you have. Again, we've intentionally not made you buy a reader to use. Use our app so you can get the child separate membership in order to keep their data and so they can practice at their rate, get that feedback that they can. But you can really do this and play around with it, at least initially. You know, walk them through it, see what it is, have fun with it, and, you know, make it a game for folks. I know, you know, it's amazing to see, you know, if we start these practices at a very young age, how young people take to this, I think way better than adults do. Like, like trying to get an adult to breathe for 20 minutes a day. Good luck with that. If you figured it out, let us know. I will. I will surely dedicate an hour of this podcast to whatever you've done. But like, just to watch, you know, children take on these exercises and really in many ways get the benefit and get the motivation to continue so quickly is just, you know, fascinating. I wish we didn't lose that so much as we grew up. Grow up.
[00:29:21] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. That much more reason to get started earlier because again, the agenda just becomes part of what you do. And you know, speaking of getting the kids there on account, I. I do your best not to mix, you know, measurements from kids and adults in the same app because you really won't be able to tell who's who and what's what. It will be really hard for you to keep track. Kind of one of the benefits of having the app is being able to keep track of how things are going. So if more than one person uses each account, that's going to be a problem. But let's say you have a five year old and you are not sure whether they are ready for this and you don't want to invest in a membership for them, which makes perfect sense. Get them on your app without measurements, just put them on the pacer without tracking HRV and just see if you know how they feel about it, how they do, you know, you can change the breathing rate, you know, to make it higher without screwing up any of your own data and just see, just see if they're ready. And if they are, well, you can get them their own account. And if not, just wait a little bit so you don't have to invest in this without knowing if a kid is ready.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: Awesome advice. Well, this was a great episode. I'm really excited. Like I said, we're supporting some research in the area and just that we now can get this into so many more, you know, residence frequency assessment for a whole new population.
And again, one that just makes my heart feel good, you know, seeing the struggles of today's youth, hearing it from parents, from teachers, therapists, another tool in folks tool belt, you know, help regulate a nervous system. I think all of our nervous systems are, you know, could be struggling one way or the other at this point in time. So just giving folks another tool to hopefully address some of the mental health challenges that are in our community. So I'm really excited to get this out and yeah, bring a whole new population into resonance frequency breathing.
[00:31:19] Speaker B: Same here. Yes, I am thrilled that we can get this to kids. Oftentimes by feedback. Kind of ignores people who are not adults.
I'm thrilled that we're able to do this.
[00:31:34] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, Ina, thank you. You were the emphasis behind the development and implementation of this in our app and so I want to just thank you for that and thanks for joining the podcast as well. As always, you can find resources, show notes, get more information about
[email protected] and as always, we'll see everybody next week. Ina, thank you so much.
[00:31:58] Speaker B: Thank you, Matt. Thanks, everybody.
