Irregular Heartbeat Can Be Good For Your Health

Anyone who has ever had any kind of interaction with a medical professional has heard the term "heart rate" before...

Heart rate refers to the speed of the heartbeat, specifically the number of heartbeats per unit of time.

As you probably remember from high school biology, your heart rate is one of the most important measures of health. A heart pumping too fast will stress the heart muscles and cause it to fail. A rate that is too slow is unable to pump blood around the body, depriving your vital organs of oxygen. And a wildly fluctuating heart rate is a sign that something is very wrong.

Heart rates vary from person to person, depending on size, weight, and other factors.

Generally speaking, between 60 and 100 beats per minutes is about average for a resting adult (that number increases with exercise, of course).

The easiest way to measure heart rate is measuring your pulse.

A more accurate and precise measure used by doctors is the Electrocardiography (ECG or EKG). The EKG is a machine that uses electrodes attached to your skin to measure the electrical changes on your skin every time your heartbeats.

The electrical waves produced by a healthy heart will look like this on an EKG:

EKG

The wave you see consists of a small bump followed by a small drop and a large spike, then a sharp drop off and another small bump (this is just the electrical version of the "lub, dub, lub, dub" you hear when you put your ear to someone's chest), and that repeats over and over as your heart pumps.

If you were to attach an EKG to a person for a day, his or her resting heart rate wouldn't look much different from the picture above. The shape itself will be about the same for most people. It's the very picture of stability and reliability.

And for the longest time, that's what doctors have thought about the human heart rate...

However, with recent advances in EKG technology, researchers have found a whole new way to look at the heart called heart rate variability, a measure of the time gap between heartbeats.

What they found was startling...

The time between heartbeats (and we're talking milliseconds here) is not only inconsistent, but the degree to which they are inconsistent, the degree of their variability, can have huge implications for your health — and in a very surprising way.1

Cardiologists have found that a high heart rate variability is actually a sign of good health.

Therefore, the more stable your heartbeat intervals are (the lower your variability is), the more worried you should be.

I was fortunate enough to attend a talk on heart rate variability (HRV) given by cardiologist Dr. Grayson Wheatley at the Ancestral Health Symposium this month. Among some of the key points in his talk:

    HRV decreases with age (which would make sense, as our health tends to decline with age).

    Athletes and other physically fit individuals tend to have a high HRV.

    Omega-3 fatty acids, the heart, and brain-healthy compounds found in things like salmon and flax seeds increase HRV

    Sleep affects HRV (good sleep raises it, bad sleep lowers it); in fact, a low HRV can predict a night of poor sleep.

    Low HRV is a sign of illness and disease (including diabetes, heart disease, and an increased risk of death).


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