Did you know that your “vibe” is a real, palpable thing? This week, I'm sharing how you can neutralize triggering emotions and calm your body when you feel anxious, stressed, and depleted using very simple science-backed breathing techniques.
Did you know that your “vibe” is a real, palpable thing? This week, I'm sharing how you can neutralize triggering emotions and calm your body when you feel anxious, stressed, and depleted using very simple science-backed breathing techniques.
Your heart is so smart that it knows your feelings based on the vibration broadcast throughout your body. All feelings either fuel positive or negative charges in the body. How people experience you is through this vibration; the energy that is broadcast emanates from your heart rate variability.
I share the story of how I first discovered this connection and how healing the heart has more to do with the mind and emotions. This ultimately led me to discover the HeartMath®️ Institute. Through HeartMath®,️ I discovered their scientific breathing techniques that taught me how to calm triggering emotions and restore coherence throughout my mind and body system.
HeartMath® techniques neutralize triggering emotions during stressful periods, which will otherwise negatively impact your heart rate. This is important because the brain decides the next best action based on your heart rate. The techniques restore coherence between the heart and the brain rhythms by promoting positive emotional states such as appreciation, compassion, and gratitude.
I then introduce the emotional compass, which illustrates how certain emotions impact the nervous system. This framework gives a deeper understanding of how, why, and when the brain releases either stress hormones or happy hormones. To encourage the happy hormones, I offer detailed instructions on how to perform three HeartMath®️ breathing techniques: Heart-Focused Breathing®, the Inner Ease®, and the Heart Lock-In®.
Our nervous system can get stuck in flight, fight, or freeze, and can potentially compromise our health and immunity. I leave several questions for listeners to ask themselves to gain deeper insight into their own connection between heart and brain, as well as breath, body, and emotions.
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Dana Frost 00:07
Welcome to Vitally You, a podcast created to introduce you to the tools that will be your roadmap for feeling younger while growing older. I'm your host Dana Frost, a wellness expert, life coach and energy medicine practitioner. Here's what you can expect conversations about vitality from the inside out with guest experts in the field of health, culture, and spirituality, and solo episodes along the way from me where I do deep dives into the topics of aging, heart intelligence, energy, medicine, and your innate capacity to heal. If you want to feel younger, while growing older, this is the place for you.
Dana Frost 00:53
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Vitally You Podcast. I'm Dana Frost, your host and this week, I'm sharing how you can neutralize triggering emotions, and calm your body when you feel anxious, stressed and depleted using very simple science backed breathing techniques.
Dana Frost 01:12
So before we get started, I want to thank the sponsor of this podcast lifewave wearable light therapy technology that harnesses the power of the body's light to activate biological shifts so that you can feel younger while growing older. Now the scientific results include enhanced physical performance and recovery time, improve sleep quality and quantity so you sleep better and more deeply. Unlocking the full movement potential and enhance fitness lifewave skincare system merges science and nature to bring out the best in your skin. Improve your vitality from the inside out by simply doing what putting a patch on your body for 12 hours. It's so simple everyone. To learn more about this age reversal technology, you can click the link in the show notes.
Dana Frost 02:04
Let's get down on today's episode, which I'm really excited about. So when was the last time you experienced heartache? How about the last time you felt angry? Disappointed, grief stricken, overwhelmed, depleted? How about hopeful, inspired, motivated or proud? You know that your heart is so smart that without you uttering a word about your feelings, it knows them based on the vibration they broadcast throughout your body. It's really so remarkable. Have you ever felt the vibrations in your emotions like felt down in your physical body? Try the next time you have a strong emotion. And notice where do you feel it in your body? And look for or feel for how, how the sensation moves? Where does it move and how does it travel in your body. Your body is an electrical system with positive and negative charges. All feelings either fuel positive charge or deplete negative charge your body. That's really important to understand all feelings they fuel positive charge or they deplete negative charge.
Dana Frost 03:20
Now I want to explain how this happens. But first, I think it might be helpful for me to share how I discovered the hearts connection to our emotional experience and our nervous system. In case you're a new listener or new to my work. I had a health crisis in 2011. I was almost 46 At the time, when I had this crisis. I was a couple weeks from turning 46 And by the time I had my pacemaker implanted, I was already 46. So I landed myself in the emergency room because I stabbed my hand with a knife pitting and avocado in a time of extreme hunger. Yes, it was a harrowing task. Now during the admissions process, my heart rate was 36 beats per minute. What which led to questioning about my athletic status and I had to say no, I'm not in high performing athlete. But suddenly my wound was a second thought to the medical team. Over the course of 24 hours it was discovered that the electrical conduction of my heart was not functioning. The electrical physiologist, I remember it was a late in the afternoon. I was admitted in the middle of the night and had all these tests done during that day. And it was at the very end like maybe five o'clock in the evening and Dr. Dre walks in and he sits down on my bed and he starts saying we know what's happening and he sits down to describe what's happening. He said it's basically a burned out body part similar to what they see in a much older women. So during the weeks and months after the initial crisis I was trying to understand Dan, why did the electrical conduction of my heart burn out? I was told I would feel like my old self again after the pacemaker was implanted. But I just continued to feel tired. I took this to my electrophysiologist. And he said, it's in your head, you just need to relax. Yes, I left his office many times crying. But thankfully, I rejected his perspective. Although my pacemaker was now pacing. So my heart wasn't in peril, it did nothing to quell my other symptoms. And women, especially the women, I want you to hear me, we get so wrapped up in our roles and responsibilities that we ignore vitally important communication from our bodies, inflammation, chronic illnesses, repetitive infections, and symptoms are not only fuzzy. Physiological hmm, couldn't get that word out. Rather, they are a part of our neurophysiology, and they represent your body, trying to get your attention.
Dana Frost 06:03
Now in my coaching model, seven years prior to my health crisis, I was a life coach and I had my training and I use this tool that I still use, called the body compass. And so I knew that it wasn't just a burned out, body part. I knew there was a deeper message and I knew that there was some connection to my life leading up to that point. So I just started researching online. And I you know, I wanted to learn more about the electrical conduction of the heart and I eventually discovered Heart Math, and I discovered it through a book by Dr. Mimi Guarneri, it's called the heart speaks. A cardiologist reveals the secret language of healing. In her book, Dr. Greiner re reveals groundbreaking what was new research at the time, this was 2000. Her book was stating 2007 Heart Math has been around for many decades researching the connection between heart the communication between the brain and the heart to the vagus nerve. But I think her book was published in 2007. Anyway, that's going down a detour. But she revealed this research that the heart is a multi layered complex organ, possessing intelligence, memory and decision making abilities independent from the mind. And that healing the heart can have more to do with healing the mind and soul than we ever knew. This book, it was groundbreaking.
Dana Frost 07:36
For me, it was as if I was finally being seen. This book provided the insights that I needed and confirmed that my heart's burned out electrical conduction was not just a worn out body part. Doctor, as I said, she introduced me to the HeartMath Institute, the HeartMath Institute, it's a scientific research institute. And the research conducted by Heart Math demonstrates this profound influence of emotions on heart rhythms, brain activity, and overall health. emotions, such as stress, anxiety, and anger can disrupt the coherence of the heart rhythm patterns, or a heart rate variability, leading to physiological imbalances and an increased risk of cardiovascular problems.
Dana Frost 08:27
Now, during the years preceding my health crisis, I'm going to tell you and I've said this before, there were stressful moments when I felt really like extreme rage, rage is already extreme. And it literally felt like my heart was on fire. And to be honest, it was so super scary. I had never experienced that extreme of an emotion. It just was wild, it felt really foreign to me. I didn't feel like myself. I'm like, Who is this what's you know, what's happening here, there was a big disconnect between who I thought I was before this particular season in my life, and these emotional experiences, and I was coaching myself. I had a therapist and you know, working through all these things. But I believe that these emotional experiences that I was having, literally felt like a fire and compromised the electrical conduction of my heart. And I will say, I'm forever grateful to Heart Math, because I needed some practice to help me connect to my heart and calm it. And besides these breathing techniques, Heart Math has a device that you can use so that you can actually get the feedback from what's happening with your heart rate variability when you practice their breathing techniques. Now, that device is called the inner while it was different when I way back when when I was using it. It was software and I had to do it on my laptop. Now they have something called inner balance that I would highly recommend if you're interested in investing in a device, it is app based, you literally hook it to your ear, you open the app, and then you can follow the breathing techniques that they offer. And you can see how you can bring coherence to your heart rate variability with these breathing techniques.
Dana Frost 10:19
Okay, so HeartMath research shows that you can use these breathing techniques to neutralize triggering emotions during stressful periods. So when you experience a triggering emotion, your heart rate increases or decreases, and your heart waves or your heart rate variability become incoherent, if it's an emotion that is depleting or triggering, and when you look at an electrocardiogram, during like a rageful episode, or really strong emotional reaction, you can actually see high spikes in irregularity in your heart rate variability. So your brain is interpreting the next best action based on your heart rate variability.
Dana Frost 11:02
So let me explain how this works. Your vagus nerve is the longest nerve in your body, and it's starts in your brain and it moves to back part of your neck and it goes down through your heart, it goes through all of your organs down to your stomach, and then it you know, it's signaling back to the brain, what's happening in the organ, so the organs are communicating to the brain through the vagus nerve. And then the brain determines next best action. The vagus nerve is relaying this line of communication. And when it goes to the heart, it picks up on the information from your heart rate variability. And it's the essential information that the brain needs to determine what's happening. So the brain is using this information to tell the rest of the body what to do. So the heart math techniques aimed to restore the coherence between the heart and the brain rhythms. So your brain has a rhythm and your heart has a rhythm, your heart actually, that rhythm is felt far from your body and your brain rhythms, they just barely, you know, they're just right here on the surface, they don't really go very far your brainwaves.
Dana Frost 12:12
So the HeartMath techniques aim to restore coherence between the heart and the brain rhythms by promoting positive emotional states such as appreciation, compassion, and gratitude. These techniques, which include heart focus, breathing, quick coherence technique, and heart lock in help you shift from stressful or depleting emotional states to more coherent and balanced states. HeartMath is grounded in rigorous scientific investigation into the physiological and psychological aspects of heart health and emotional well being. So let me explain how specific emotions impact your nervous system and the chemicals that pulse through your body. I want to pause in this moment to let you know something if you are on my mailing list. When I send an email about this episode, you will be receiving my coaching PDF that has a diagram that illustrates your emotional experience. So I'm going to describe it here on the podcast. But if you would like that specific PDF, you have to join my mailing list. And what I'm realizing I'm revamping my website, let me explain what you have to do, you have to go to my website, I'll put the link in the show notes. And you'll scroll down to a little box that says join the mailing list. And you'll fill that out and then you'll be on the mailing list. And as those come in. During this episode, I will make sure that you receive this PDF called I call it the emotional compass. Heart Math used to call it the emotional compass. Now they call it the depletion to renewal grid.
Dana Frost 13:50
On this PDF, it's going to have four squares. So there's a cross that divides the paper into four squares. The top half of the grid is representative of the sympathetic nervous system, which is going faster speeding up the bottom half of the grid is the parasympathetic nervous system and that slowing down the whole page is representative of the autonomic nervous system. So when you look at the page and you divide it vertically, what's on the right side of the grid is fueling. So there are going to be emotional experiences that actually fuel your your health, your immunity. On the left side of the grid, there are going to be emotions that deplete your system. So remember, all emotions are depleting are fueling so they give a positive charge or a negative charge. They fuel or deplete your health. So when you have your grid, you're going to put down you're going to fill that in on the top left hand side you're going to put emotions that you've experienced, that are depleting but your heart rate goes up So here are a few rage, frustration, anger, anxiety. And then on the left hand side of the grid on the bottom part for the parasympathetic heart rate slows down would be emotions like depression, grief, hopelessness, fear, fear could go on top or bottom, some emotions can go on top or bottom, on the right hand side of the grid. On the top right hand side, remember, these are all fueling, there'll be emotions that are fueling, but your heart rate goes up to a faster rate, anticipation, courage, pride, feeling competent. On the lower right hand side of the grid on the square, there are emotions that are fueling, but your heart rate is slower. So keys, maybe joy, empathy, contentment. So you want to look at that, that grid on the horizontal line, that horizontal line represents, what are the chemicals that are being released through these emotional experiences.
Dana Frost 15:59
So if we're going, we break the paper and we go towards the right, those are going to be hormones that are actually helping you from a health perspective. Things like bonding hormones, oxytocin, on the left hand side of the grid, it would be a hormones that are depleting. So I would just throw out the stress hormone cortisol. So there are a cascade of hormones are released when you have emotional experiences. And those hormones, the variety of hormones that get released, they're going to be either fueling or depleting. And so you can see, when you look at this grid, you can look at your own emotional experience. And where do you land on the grid? Are you mostly fueling emotions? Are you mostly having depleting? Are you more in sympathetic where your heart is running faster, are you more, the heart rate is slower, it's depleted, you don't have the energy, you're just tired, you're kind of withdrawn or you're open and your heart rate is going higher, but you just you feel excited, or you're just you feel really at peace, and you feel that E is all emotions are going to fall under parasympathetic or sympathetic. And that's the slowing down and speeding up. What's really interesting is that by implementing the HeartMath breathing techniques, you can create coherent Heart Rate Variability patterns, which then supports your body and your health. We talked about this, the brain responds to depleting emotions by signaling the release of stress hormones. And the brain thus also responds to fueling emotions by signaling and releasing happy hormones. And that signaling, it begins in the heart rate with a heart rate variability. So you have your that heart rate variability, which is that electrical conduction, and it's the energy that is felt, how people experience you is this vibration, the energy that emanates from your heart rate variability, and the research from Heart Math proves that we can tap into the intelligence of our heart to these breathing techniques, creating coherence in our system, and positively impacting our health and well being.
Dana Frost 18:15
I'd like to say that one episode of a depleting emotion Well, let me say this, to be human is to experience all emotions, regardless of their depleting or fueling that. That's a fully expressed human, you're, you know, you experience emotions that are all over the emotional compass. The problem is that when you get in a pattern, and you have a repetitive depleting emotion, your whole system is impacted, your health is impacted, your well being is impacted. And so one episode is not going to compromise your health. But it's more if you if you lean in, you succumb to a pattern, which I feel like I did with rage that you compromise your health.
Dana Frost 18:59
The other thing I want to say is we you know, let's say you're in a period of grief, you can be coherent in your grief. So when we experience there's something going on in life and maybe we have a traumatic experience and there are depleting emotions and we've got to move to that experience has happened to me when I had my marriage crisis I had, you know, a lot of feelings that were challenging, but I was able to be present with them but not overcome by them. And by that time, I was so well practiced with Heart Math that it really was this balm to support me when I was in the experiencing these depleting emotions. So don't mistake depleting emotions as bad or wrong or incoherent because you can be coherent any emotions that you may be don't want to experience but life happens and so that's the human emotional response.
Dana Frost 19:53
What I want to share with you is during the years before my health crisis, I went through a season of getting sick every time I traveled and I had read regular episodes of what I thought were allergies. And these were not just physiological responses I learned later. But the interaction of my nervous system which felt stress through my emotions, and impacted my heart rate variability, then sending this cascade of communication throughout my system, which was a lot of cortisol, the stress hormone, I ended up with adrenal fatigue. Like that's one of the things I discovered after my pacemaker is implanted and I went researching why am I still feeling this way? Well, there were a lot of things going on with me. Depression, anxiety, these emotions that are depleting, they can impact glucose metabolism, they impact sleep, they impact hormones. So we really want to be attuned to, are we being overcome by emotions that are depleting? And if that's the case, how can we neutralize and use these breathing techniques to bring harmony and coherence back to our system?
Dana Frost 21:00
So I want you just to think about what was the last time you experienced to trigger an emotion? How did your body respond? Did you have tension? Can you recall, like what was happening with your heart rate with your muscles, maybe your shoulders felt sore? And how about your hips, your face facial expressions, what I learned through Heart Math that, as I was learning Heart Math, I could honestly tap into the release of chemicals, when I would have an emotional experience that was strong, I could then feel like things pulsing through my system. And when those chemicals are released, they don't just evaporate, like that episode is over. Whatever the triggering event is, you have the emotion the episodes over, the chemicals don't just disappear, it takes time for the de escalation. This is why I think Heart Math is so powerful, because it allows, it provides you with a technique that you can use to bring your body back into coherence and harmony.
Dana Frost 22:06
I'm going to share three of the Heart Math breathing techniques. And first one is very simple. And if you've been listening to this podcast, you probably know heart focus breathing. These techniques are visualizations, you use, heart focus, breathing, you just visualize the inhale and exhale to flow to and from your heart center. You want to hold that for 20 seconds. So visualize, I can already feel my system like crew coming into harmony, as I'm doing this and talking about it. So heart focus, breathing, you visualize the inhale and exhale to flow to and from your heart center, and your heart. You know, you're multi dimensional beings, so it's all around your body. Heart focus, breathing, the inhale and exhale flows to and from the heart. That's the first technique.
Dana Frost 22:55
The second one is inner ease technique. And this is when you draw up the feeling of inner ears. So how do you feel when you feel inner ears, your shoulders, drop your body relaxes, feels like flow, your muscles aren't constricted, your breathing calms down, it's inhale, exhale is roughly the same. So you drop the feeling in all of your body, and you have that inner ease to flow to and from your heart center. Such a powerful, simple technique, feeling of inner ease flowing to and from your heart center. Notice what you notice. What I love about these Heart Math breathing techniques is you can do them anywhere you can do them. When you're driving, you can do them when you're walking, you can do them when you have a difficult conversation. You can do them when you're in the middle of a fight or when you're helping another person or your children, and they're activated. I've used this in so many applications when my daughter broke her nose and had this horrible accident with her nose and we were in you know, an emergency situation and the doctor had to stick her nose back to her face and it was such a traumatic event. And I just went right into the inner East technique.
Dana Frost 24:16
First I started with heart focus breathing in or ease technique and I I literally just could feel this peaceful energy coming to and from my heart going to her. Now we're going to move on to the heart lock in heart lock in is really fun. So you have to remember an experience when you had a feeling that was fueling. I will remember right now I'm gonna remember the birth of my granddaughter, which was in October and I mean, my heart just grew. So that feeling was excitement, excitement. I was so proud of my daughter and just so filled with love. I'm going to recall that memory and those feelings and I'm going to have them flow to and from my heart centering, you want to really bring up that memory and all of your senses, like see yourself in that setting? Who was with you? What were you looking at what were the colors, what were the sounds, you want to bring all of the memory up. And just allow those feelings to flow to and from your heart center, all the way around 360 degrees around your body, heart lockin. Remember, we call that experience and those emotions and have those emotions flow to and from your heart center, you want to be doing that for at least 20 seconds is what the research shows. So you lock into that memory and those feelings and you have I can actually feel my heart I can feel things coming into coherence when I do this, I would love for you to practice it. And notice what you notice. And let me know what your experience is.
Dana Frost 25:55
So what happens is that our nervous system gets stuck in fight flight or freeze. And oftentimes our default is fight flight or freeze and we're just our breath is in that very shallow breathing pattern all the time 24/7. And you can switch your default, so that you're not in that if you practice heart, math breathing techniques every day just to retrain that breathing pattern. And I would have my clients do this, I'm like at a minimum, just sit down for five minutes a day. And practice if you really need to retrain your nervous system to not be in fight flight or freeze. This is what I did four months after my pacemaker was implanted, I sat down with my software, my device, I was hooked up to my laptop, and I would do a session every day. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes to the inner balance as a facilitator, because I'm an official Heart Math facilitator, I could sell these, I don't sell them, I just don't want to stock them. So you can go straight to the Heart Math website. If you're interested in purchasing one.
Dana Frost 26:59
After today's episode, I just would invite you to reflect on your own emotional experiences over the past month, or over the past six months or a year. And what messages is your heart sending to your brain based on your emotional experience? Are you having health conditions, because you're in a heightened state of emotional depleting emotional feeling experiences, you really want to be curious about that. And know that what's so cool is that you can calm these triggering and depleting emotions down you can bring neutrality to your system at a minimum, you can neutralize your system, if you continue to practice, you can actually move yourself to the other side of the grid, you have the power to have dominion over your emotional experiences, I said it but to be human is to have all the emotional experiences. But we don't want to live on the left side of the grid, we don't want to live in a state of emotions that are depleting.
Dana Frost 28:01
So if you remember my last episode about heart health, I talked about the impact of stress on the body and the heart depleting emotions. When you have them, your body is going to try to save you it's trying to protect you by releasing hormones, ie glucose will also be released and glucose will spike. And we talked about this in the last episode, then insulin needs to come and clear that from your system. If you already have all the energy you need, that glucose is going to get stored and it will become fat. And then that fat becomes a production machine of hormones that you don't want your sex hormones to suffer. You're producing an abundance of hormones you don't need and you don't want. The other thing that happens with your heart rate is that your heart health is that your triglycerides will increase because you have all this fuel in your body that your body doesn't need and it's getting stored. And then you have this potential risk for arterial arteries to get clogged, causing coronary heart disease, cardiac episodes like heart attacks and strokes. And I want to mention excess weight is also stress on the body.
Dana Frost 29:09
So I want you to remember that the lifestyle habits that you implement today can have a powerful impact on your future health outcomes. I don't know how many of you know this, but my beloved dad was obese. My beloved grandmother, his mother was obese. They had adult onset obesity. And I watched them. And I just knew I didn't want to go down the same health story as them and so at different times, I was making decisions about my health and my lifestyle. Because you've heard me say I was pre diabetic at one point. So I no longer pre diabetic. My glucose is fine. My insulin is fine. As I said I had adrenal fatigue. I had a lot of things kind of working against me for long term health and long term, poor heart outcomes.
Dana Frost 29:58
But because The best time to start is today I started way back 10 plus years ago. And I've impacted my health today. So you have that same power. I really encourage you if you haven't to have an extensive heart review with your doctor. Remember, heart disease is the number one killer of women in the US. And it is the number one killer of people globally.
Dana Frost 30:23
If you miss my last episode, go back and check it out. Because I do go into the myths about heart disease. I talk about medications that our model of medicine wants you to take for your heart health. And I give you tips on saying no to medicine. And again, I'm not providing medical advice, but I'm telling you, if you will take ownership of your health, you absolutely can impact your heart health positively even if you have negative markers. So don't miss that. The next episode is going to be I have a very special guest, Deepak Kenan who is a nutrition colleague of mine, she has a book that's been published about sleep. It is an amazing episode. So you don't want to miss that.
Dana Frost 31:10
Be sure if you aren't on my mailing list, go to my website. I'm sorry. It's super clunky. I'm gonna put a link in the show notes, but you'll have to scroll down, subscribe to my email list and you'll get that PDF document. If that's just too much for you email me and say Dana, can you put me on your email list and I want that PDF. Dana frost@me.com is what I recommend because the Danafrost.com. Sometimes that webmail address doesn't really work. That's what I have for you this week. And thank you so much for being with me. I still haven't reached 100 reviews. So if you haven't left me a review, please leave me a review. Go to Apple podcast and leave the review. And if you are enjoying these episodes, I hope that you are subscribed and that you've downloaded them, all of that and as always, I'm streaming love from my heart to yours. Thank you so much for being with me today.