Dr Libby Weaver

Heart rate variability (HRV) is more than just a health metric; it’s a profound indicator of how well your body can adapt to stress and maintain physiological homeostasis (balance). This key measure tells us about the flexibility of our heart’s rhythm, which in turn reflects the overall health of our autonomic nervous system – the part of us that controls everything from our heartbeat to our digestive processes, without being instructed to do so with our conscious thoughts. A higher HRV suggests that your body is adept at managing stress and recovering from it, while a lower HRV might indicate an overload of stress and a potential need for changes to your lifestyle. Whether you’re looking to enhance your mental clarity, improve physical performance, or simply feel more centred and grounded day-to-day, boosting your HRV can be a gateway to achieving these goals. Let’s explore some accessible and effective strategies that can help you enhance your HRV, thereby improving your overall health and wellbeing.

1. Chill out with meditation

Meditation is more than just sitting quietly; it’s an active engagement with your mind to foster calmness and clarity. Incorporating regular meditation or mindfulness practices into your week can significantly enhance your HRV by triggering your body’s relaxation response. If a daily practice feels impossible, aim for three sessions per week, utilising techniques like guided meditation, progressive relaxation, or even restorative yoga. Or you might prefer to simply sit comfortably and with your eyes closed, give the air a colour and imagine it entering and exiting your body. These practices can help reduce stress hormones and elevate your mood.

2. Get moving

Physical exercise does wonders not just for your muscles but also for your heart and mind. Regular activity, such as walking, cycling, swimming, or sports helps strengthen your heart muscles and improves the efficiency of your stress response systems, which in turn boosts your HRV. The key is consistency; even short bursts of exercise can add up to significant benefits for your HRV and overall health. If the idea of ‘exercise’ is not appealing, think about ways you can move more throughout your day and simply embrace the practice of a daily walk.

3. Sleep on it

A good night’s sleep is a cornerstone of great health. Sleep acts as a reset button for your autonomic nervous system, which plays a crucial role in managing your HRV. Aim for 7-9 hours of quality sleep per night. Establish a calming bedtime routine, reduce/avoid exposure to screens before two hours before bed, avoid caffeine after midday, and create a comfortable sleep environment to improve your sleep quality. You’ll wake up feeling refreshed and more equipped to handle the day’s stresses.

4. Nourish yourself

What you eat has a profound impact on your body’s stress response and HRV. A way of eating rich in omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants, and fibre can support your nervous system and help mitigate the effects of the constant relentless production of stress hormones. For omega-3 fats, include foods like sheep’s brains, fatty fish (wild-caught salmon, mackerel), grass-fed beef and lamb, flaxseeds, chia seeds and walnuts. All coloured plant foods contain antioxidants and berries are particularly high, while vegetables are a source of fibre. Aim for seven serves of vegetables a day (or at least ensure you get the minimum five serves recommended). These nutrients not only improve your HRV but also contribute to overall physical and emotional wellbeing.

5. Breathe low and slow

Breathing exercises are a quick and effective way to enhance your HRV. Practices like diaphragmatic breathing, 4-7-8 breathing, or box breathing can increase the activation of your parasympathetic nervous system, leading to immediate relaxation. Spend a few minutes each day focusing on your breath or check in with how you are breathing and slow it down every hour on the hour; this simple act can help elevate your HRV and reduce stress levels.

6. Embrace contrast therapy

Alternating between hot and cold temperatures, known as contrast therapy, can also significantly impact your HRV. This method, which can include activities like sauna sessions followed by brief cold showers or dips between an ice bath and a hot spa, encourages your body to adapt to varying stressors. The exposure to heat and cold can stimulate your autonomic nervous system in beneficial ways, improving your body’s ability to regulate stress and recover from it. Regularly engaging in contrast therapy can boost your HRV, enhancing your overall resilience and vitality. Please note, clinically, I’ve found that for some women, initially avoiding the cold end of this spectrum is better for them. Heat up in a sauna, but then allow yourself to simply adjust to room temperature as the ‘cold’ for a time. After your HRV has improved, even a little, you’ll benefit from the cold exposure. This appears to be particularly true for those who are iron deficient. Correcting the iron deficiency is also crucial of course.

Improving your HRV is about more than just monitoring a metric; it’s about adopting a lifestyle that fosters resilience and vitality. Start with one or two of these practices and gradually build a routine that feels sustainable for your lifestyle. Your body – and your nervous system – will thank you.

Many of us have learned from a young age that selfishness is something negative. 

It is important we learn that the needs, wants and desires of others are equally as important as our own – I am certainly not saying otherwise. Transitioning away from an ego-centric view of the world is an important aspect of the maturation process and one of the ways we develop traits such as compassion, empathy and generosity, all of which make the world a better place. 

Yet I wonder if, in our plight to eradicate selfishness, we have gone too far? 

As humans, we perceive polarities and judgements where they don’t need to exist. When we are taught by well-meaning adults – who want us to grow up and become contributing members of society – that selfishness is “bad” and selflessness is “good”, we equate this with who we are at our very core. Many women in particular, have made selfishness so wrong, that their daily lives demonstrate a damaging abnegation of the self, a fear of being a frustration to others, and as philosopher Alain de Botton so eloquently puts it: “a modesty that borders on self-erasure.”  

When we take selflessness too far, it hurts us. Just as it would if we took selfishness too far. Yet, so far down the list do too many women place their own needs that it impacts their health and happiness in small and sometimes significant ways. 

Everything else – and I truly do mean everything – comes before their own health and wellbeing. They feel guilty about taking the tiniest amount of time for themselves, struggle to say no, to set boundaries and to ask for help, even as they feel overwhelmed with all the things on their plates. Sometimes they stay in jobs or relationships that dull their shine for many years without examining what the job/other person is asking of them and also their side of it – why they do this to themselves. They might stay for practical reasons (such as money) or reasons related to their beliefs – that they must be self-sacrificing to be a “good” human, for example. Is that really service or is it servitude?

One of the problems with living this way is that we cannot continue to give on an empty tank. There’s a reason why in an airplane we are instructed to fit our own oxygen mask first – we simply cannot be of service to others if we don’t meet even our most basic of needs first. Plus, we are only really hurting ourselves in the long run. Living in a way that does not light us up, bring us joy or contribute to a long and healthful life.

It is time to move away from a black and white view of being either entirely selfish or wholly selfless. I encourage you to maintain a modicum of selfishness in order to protect your health. Not the type of selfishness that exploits others, but a version that allows us to be more forthright with what matters to us and manage our time and resources accordingly. Don’t let it take a health crisis – or perhaps it will be an identity crisis – to wake you up to the fact that your needs matter just as much as anyone else’s. 

Living a life where your needs are honoured and valued is your birthright. And we teach other people to make space for our needs by doing so for ourselves. 

As humans, we have an overarching desire or expectation—consciously or unconsciously—about how our life is supposed to be. For some this is age-related. They might think: ‘By the time I’m twenty-seven I need to be in a serious relationship and have an investment property.’ For others, it is more general: ‘My children need to be happy, healthy and doing well at school, and my work needs to be fulfilling but not too taxing on my time or energy.’ 

This is what I refer to as your ‘blueprint’. We can (unknowingly) create these blueprints from quite a young age when we imagine what our adult life is going to be like, and we don’t always realise they’re there.

When you feel down or anxious or stressed out, it can be because you perceive that how life is right now is not matching up with how you think it is supposed to be. You’re comparing your blueprint to your current conditions and feeling that something is lacking. 

So, any friction between these known or unknown preconceived ideas about how life will look by a certain age (our blueprint), and/or how it is every day (our life conditions) can be a source of stress. We have a tendency to clump all the departments of life together and feel glum or joyous about their overall vibe. Yet, if you pause to reflect on each area of your life, sure there may be a couple that aren’t so flash (temporarily or long term), but the rest might be quite okay, or even rather wonderful. 

So, if we recognise that our life conditions versus our blueprint is a major factor (or even just a contributing factor) in our stress or sadness or downtrodden lethargy or anxious feelings, what can we do about it? You can alter one or the other.

There are times when we can change our life conditions and times when we can’t. You might want to quit your job, for example, but doing so immediately would bring more stress with the ripple effect it would create… at the moment. 

Or perhaps you may decide to start your own business and just need more time for that to become more financially prosperous before quitting your day job. In time, you may be presented with another opportunity in a field you are more passionate about or maybe your financial situation changes and you’re able to focus on growing your business. So, one option is to change your life conditions.

The other, changing your blueprint, can be just as effective—although some find this harder. Here’s an example. 

Let’s say your blueprint tells you that to be ‘successful’ you need to own a four-bedroom house in a nice neighbourhood in a major city. Let’s say this house will cost you $2 million. Yet, if you change your blueprint and relish relocating to a smaller city or town, you might obtain those same criteria for $750,000. This is often prompted by pondering the question: what does being debt free offer you? Instead of living on credit card debt, working two jobs, always tired, and rarely seeing your loved ones, changing your blueprint about what life is supposed to look like could lead you to create a completely different way of life. 

In other words, by contemplating whether the blueprint your younger self imagined is actually what your adult self wants can open you up to live in ways you had not previously considered. And then the possibilities truly are endless.  So, if you feel that there is an internal struggle resulting from what your life looks like right now and how you imagined it, ask yourself: How do I want to live? Then reflect on whether you need to update your blueprint or adjust some of your current life conditions to match up with that life. 

By Jenny Brooks, Senior Practitioner at The Dr Libby Clinic.

In modern life, where the pace rarely slows, the term “exhaustion” has been casually woven into our daily lexicon. Yet, there lies a profound difference between the tiredness felt after a day’s labour and the often misunderstood condition known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). What I get asked most is how do I know if the exhaustion I feel is becoming chronic fatigue?

Let’s first establish that CFS is not just tiredness or intermittent levels of exhaustion. Far from mere lethargy, someone experiencing CFS tends to find every task – no matter how small – insurmountable. They’ll need to have a rest after taking a shower or dropping the kids to school. Doing the groceries may end with a sore throat or the simple act of hanging washing will leave muscles aching.

Diagnosing CFS

CFS is an illness characterised by multifactorial symptoms and causes, making it a chameleon of disorders. It manifests as a dysfunction of the central nervous system, impacting mood and affecting sleep, resulting in pain, neurocognitive ability, and fundamentally, fatigue. This variability in symptoms renders CFS challenging to diagnose as there is no specific test. It tends to be first considered after ruling other illnesses out. Nevertheless, the growing prevalence of CFS has necessitated a clinical framework for understanding and addressing it.

Diagnosing CFS involves identifying a constellation of symptoms persisting for more than six months, including unexplained fatigue that’s not alleviated by rest, muscle pain, impaired memory, and more. This illness often leaves individuals grappling with severe cognitive disruptions – up to 85% report difficulties in processing information, concentration, and memory, all intertwined with physical discomfort.

Tracing the roots

CFS doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. It often follows a labyrinth of causative factors, with a significant proportion of cases traced back to infections – viral or bacterial. Stress, sleep deprivation, and exposure to toxins also play critical roles in the genesis of CFS. Understanding these triggers is crucial for recovery, hinting at a path tailored to the origin of one’s illness.

The journey to recovery

Recovery from CFS unfolds in three stages: moving from depletion to boosting cellular energy systems, and eventually addressing broader health issues specific to the individual. This journey is as diverse as the sufferers themselves, necessitating a bespoke approach. Uncovering how the illness first began will determine the path to recovery.

The cornerstone is commonly stress management, an endeavour easier said than done in a society that glorifies perpetual motion. For someone with CFS, recovery demands a re-evaluation of one’s priorities and boundaries across all life facets, from work to social engagements, movement to daily activities. Sleep hygiene, focused attention on single tasks, nutritional adjustments, and hydration also form the pillars of a recovery strategy. Additionally, nutritional supplements, under professional guidance, can offer significant benefits or sufferers can simply start by removing stimulants such as coffee and refined sugars, alongside a focus of eating food (real food), not junk.