The Most Effective Ways to Improve Your Heart Rate Variability | Sarah Ann Macklin & Andy Galpin | Be Well Moments

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/XXwgXDeOYJI

Can you actually improve your heart rate variability? Understanding HRV helps reveal how balanced your nervous system really is.This clip explores the most effective ways to increase HRV, from improving sleep quality and consistent exercise to understanding where cold plunges and saunas truly fit in. Sarah discusses how core health habits like rest, movement, and nutrition have the strongest impact on HRV, while short-term stressors such as cold exposure or heat can cause temporary changes but not lasting improvements.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers
improve their health and well-being.
If people want to increase theirHIV, what would you suggest?
Yeah, first thing is, going backto earlier conversation, remove
any performance anchor that willdo it #1 so if you have a

(00:21):
negative health practice. So when people lose weight, HIV
tends to go up. When people eat higher quality
food and their HIV tends to go up.
When people exercise, it goes upa ton.
Very few things will increase HIV more than exercise.
Those things will all shoot it up.
If you have, well, in fact, I'lladd a little more.
Nothing will improve HIV more than sleep, especially if you

(00:44):
have a a clinical or subclinicalsleep disorder, which is really
far more prevalent than people realize.
Those big huge practices will rocket shoot HIV up.
Past that we can start getting into some smaller impact stuff.
But that is the overwhelming majority time the people that we
have doubled HRV in or had huge improvements in that that

(01:06):
actually had problems with HRV. It's because usually one of
those 3 or 4 big rocks is being taken care of.
The ones that will move at the most for sure will be against
sleep and exercise. And if you have to hedge, this
is probably when endurance cardiovascular like type of
exercise does seem to win a little bit.

(01:28):
You're more likely to see improvements when you see that
go up. And that may or may not also be
associated with the lower resting heart rate, but those
are the biggest ways to move it.What about cold plunges and
saunas and things like that? Because that's becoming huge.
Yeah, but they're not going to have even closeness impact as
those other ones I said, so you can actually look.
So HRV will change with cold in a non common sensical way.

(01:52):
So if you get into HRV, you get into a cold plunge, you will see
HRV drop actually immediately. And this is exactly what it
should be. So maybe I'll back up a quick
second. HRV heart rate variability is
again, this indirect marker of autonomic nervous system.
And your autonomic nervous system is in multiple parts.
But the easy way to think about it is just in two parts.

(02:12):
Although again, there's, there'smore than this.
You rest and digest. There's also freeze in there.
Then then you have your, your, your sympathetic drive, right?
So parasympathetic rest and digest and sympathetic Dr. is
arousal and up regulation and fight or flight and things like
that. Great.
HRV is telling us kind of where on that balance you are, how
much of balance of sympathetic and how much of balance of

(02:33):
parasympathetic, right? So we tend to say a low HRV is
sympathetic, like you're more switched towards that side.
It's not an on and off button, right?
It's a gradient here. And a higher HRV means more
parasympathetic, more down regulated.
So when we say these things likea really low HIV is associated
with poor health, it's generallybecause that's associated with

(02:54):
somebody being stuck in sympathetic Dr. This could be
stress, this could be, you know,poor sleep.
This like, OK, so that hopefullythat kind of connects the
picture a little bit of what's going on.
So if you get into a a cold water or anything like that,
your HIV will drop immediately. This is going to shoot you into
sympathetic Dr. This is why you get out and you feel you're

(03:17):
exhilarated. Your adrenaline has gone up.
Cortisol doesn't go up much actually, like a huge misnomer.
It doesn't really change that much after cold in men or women
like in humans at least to be clear on that one.
But adrenaline will go way up, like way up and HIV will drop
down considerably. But if you look at that person,
30 minutes, 6090, up to several hours, 3 to 4 hours plus HIV

(03:42):
will climb in those three hours,four hours, five hours post cold
and will generally climb for at least three plus hours.
And it will go way past baseline.
And so if I wanted to hack a test, I would say, OK, take your
HIV and let's just say it's 20 and get in the cold water.
You get out of the cold water might be 10.

(04:03):
Again, I'm making numbers up here, but an hour later, instead
of being 20, you might be at 30 and two hours later you might be
at 40. So it'll have gone way up.
That didn't really change your Physiology.
This is just a compensatory response to going into a huge
sympathetic Dr. and now you havethis parasympathetic rebound.
It's the exact same thing that happens with cortisol and

(04:25):
exercise. You go exercise right now.
Cortisol goes up in the few hours post exercise.
It'll come way back down in a compensatory response.
That's what it's supposed to do,right?
That's exactly what we're looking for.
It's the exact same reason why taking a hot shower or a hot
bath at night gets you really hot, but then your body has this

(04:45):
compensatory cooling and you have to cool down to fall
asleep. So getting really, really hot
actually helps you get colder tofall asleep.
It's like hormatic stressors, right?
Like very classic over response.So the question really though is
if I chronically did ice plungesor cold plunges or something
like that, would I chronically improve my HRV?

(05:09):
And I don't think that we reallyhave any data to suggest it's a
really going to be a strong effect.
If you like cold plunges from probably, you know, like
different topic we can go into at some other point fine, but
that's not and it wouldn't compare nearly as much as sleep
and exercise. Sauna does seem to be pretty
effective at that. And chronic sauna use has more

(05:32):
data. It has data on, there's
observational studies on it, there's randomized controlled
trials, we have epidemiology on it.
There's enough there. In fact, there's enough
molecular mechanism stuff there to say, OK, generally associated
with positive health and probably a really good thing.
So I'd probably be more comfortable saying, OK, if you
want to use. And again, it's not sauna, it's

(05:53):
hot. So it's sauna or any other
methodology of that. But the way to think about that
is you can get hot with exercisetoo, and exercise does a lot of
other things for you that just sitting in a hot sauna doesn't
do. So if we're looking at pecking
order again, I will really go back to exercise and sleep for

(06:15):
sure. And, of course, mental health.
And nutrition. Yeah, but if you're already
doing those things, or like my grandfather, he doesn't
exercise, is never hit, wouldn'tyou know where to start?
But he uses the sauna like, great.
It's better than nothing. There are positive things there.
The only thing I would really caution one against is saying,

(06:37):
oh, the sauna is more important than the exercise, or I don't
need to exercise because I'm in the sauna, or I don't worry
about my sleep, I'm doing my sauna like it.
The problem we have with these hacks and stuff, not to call a
sauna hack, but you get the point, is when they exceed the
baseline stuff. So that's I think the most
appropriate way to think about this.

(06:58):
Thanks so much for listening to hear the full episode.
There's a link in the description.