Compassion and Heart Rate Variability
We are very happy to be able to share with you a study looking at two of our favourite topics - heart rate variability and compassion!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28337432
We are very happy to be able to share with you a study looking at two of our favourite topics - heart rate variability and compassion!
HRV is an important physiological marker for overall health, and the body-mind connection. Therefore, there is significant value of training compassion to increase HRV and training HRV to facilitate compassion.
The evolution of care-giving involving hormones, such as oxytocin, enables humans to connect, co-regulate each other's emotions and create pro-sociality. Compassion-based interventions draw upon a number of specific exercises and strategies to stimulate these physiological processes and create conditions of interpersonal safeness, thereby helping people engage with, alleviate, and prevent suffering. Hence, compassion-based approaches are connected with our evolved caring motivation and attachment and our general systems that help regulate distress. Physiologically, they are connected to activity of the vagus nerve and corresponding adaptive heart rate variability (HRV).
This paper argues that the field of compassion science needs to move toward including HRV as a primary outcome measure in its future assessment and training, due to its connection to vagal regulatory activity, and its link to overall health and well-being.
We cannot agree more :)
Have a blessed week everyone.
