Everyone feel for your pulse.

Hold out your hand, thumb up, and feel for the knobby bone at the top of your wrist.

Okay, now slide your hand down across the front of your wrist.

Feel those like strands of spaghetti, those are the tendons

in your wrist. If you press lightly between that knobby bone and that first tendon,

you should feel your pulse. Got it? Okay, now what we're going to do is feel what happens

to our pulse when we take a deep breath. We're going to try it twice.

Try to feel what happens to your pulse when you inhale and when you exhale.

All right, here we go. Slow inhale, slow exhale.

One more time. In...

Out.

What happened when you breathed in and breathed out?

What happened when you breathed in and breathed out?

You should have felt your pulse speed up when you inhaled and slowed down when you exhale. That's called heart rate variability.

A measure of the control our vagus nerve has over our heart, and it's a good thing.

A healthy heart is not a metronome.

Low heart rate variability predicts greater risk of heart disease and death from several causes.

High-risk patients with low variability and heart rate have twice the risk of dying prematurely.

Is there anything we can do to positively impact heart rate variability?

Voluntary slow breathing at about six breaths per minute is a technique that's been used for

thousands of years as an essential part of many meditative and relaxation practices.

It can benefit several heart rate variability parameters, offering a low-tech, low-cost technique.

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