Your Brain Follows Your Heart's Rhythm

By the Institute of HeartMath

New research shows how emotional reactions during the day can affect how you sleep at night.

If you allow stress to build-up during the day, it throws off your body's rhythms and can lead to overload, headaches, backaches, indigestion, energy drain and more.

Your heart generates the strongest rhythmic pattern in the body. Your brain and nervous system then entrain to your heart's rhythm. Whether your heart rhythm is coherent or incoherent, that's what your brain and nervous system entrain with.

Shifting your heart into a smooth coherent rhythm a couple times during the day helps release stress as you go and resets your body's rhythms for better sleep at night. Here's how:

Take a coherence break in-between activities, at your desk or anywhere.

Shift your attention to your heart (look at picture of a loved one, remember a favorite pet, or recall a time in nature) and feel appreciation or gratitude. It's important that the appreciation be heartfelt (not just from your mind) to activate heart coherence and the hormones that help bring harmony and stability to your mental and emotional nature.

Breathe a true feeling or attitude of appreciation through the area of your heart for a minute or two (without mentally multi-tasking as you do this).

Taking a coherence break also increases balance and resilience, and it helps you listen to your heart's intuitive guidance on what else you need to do to release stress or prevent stress build-up.

It may take several days using these tips for your sleep rhythms to reset if they've been out of whack for a while. Even if you don't sleep like a baby the first night, you will start to accrue benefits from the practice.

To speed up the process, practice this Quick Coherence® Technique several times during the day to reduce the stress that's keeping you awake at night. You'll learn to relieve worry, fatigue and tension. You will improve your emotional, mental and physical balance during the day so you're prepared for restful sleep at night.