What Is HeartMath? A Gentle Path to Resetting Your Nervous System
HeartMath is an easy science-backed method that helps your nervous system shift out of chronic survival mode and into a state of balance, clarity, and safety. It’s especially supportive for people living with chronic fatigue, chronic pain, trauma, anxiety, and other neuroplastic conditions, where the body has learned to stay braced, overwhelmed, or exhausted.
Instead of pushing through or forcing change, HeartMath teaches you to befriend the conversation between your heart, brain, and subconscious mind, so you can reshape the emotional and physiological patterns that keep your system stuck in stress. We introduce it in Befriend in our first practice class, to lean into gently as part of daily life, to begun to feel influential in our state of being.
Under stress, trauma, pressure, or long-term overwhelm, your heart rhythms become jagged and incoherent. This sends a “danger signal” to your emotional brain, which keeps the limbic system on high alert. HeartMath uses a combination of:
♡ heart-focused breathing
♡ emotional regulation techniques
♡ coherence practices
♡ biofeedback tools (optional - contact Nadia to purchase these)
These create smooth, organised heart rhythms known as heart rate coherence (HRV). Coherence tells your nervous system: “You are safe. You can soften. You can recover.” This shift allows your brain to exit survival mode, reduce stress chemistry, and restore access to clarity, perspective, and emotional resilience.
Chronic pain, chronic fatigue, trauma responses, and many stress-related symptoms occur when the nervous system becomes sensitised, which means the brain and nervous system interpreting ordinary sensations, and stimuli in the environment as dangerous. HeartMath helps reverse this sensitisation by:
Over time, your system learns a new baseline; one that supports energy, rest, and recovery rather than exhaustion and hypervigilance. We combine this with compassion based brain retraining and somatic (body) safety, and self inquiry about what else might be keeping your system in a state of alarm, in order to help the body self heal.
Every one of us has a familiar emotional “soundtrack”. This is a subconscious emotional tone we return to throughout the day. It might be:
This soundtrack isn’t a flaw, it’s learned and then practiced on autopilot by our brain. Often from trauma, stress, early conditioning, or long-term overwhelm. HeartMath helps you lovingly recognise this soundtrack and ask a powerful question, “Is this emotional baseline supporting the life I want to create?” If the answer is no, HeartMath gives you tools to gently rewire it in the present moment, in easy and accessible ways.
Your nervous system learns through repetition. Your emotional states become emotional habits. Your habits become attitudes. Your attitudes become traits. Your traits become a self-concept that you call “me." But you are not fixed or stuck. You are built to evolve. You just need to notice you have choice. HeartMath uses neuroplasticity in a compassionate way by helping you repeatedly practice states of:
♡ appreciation ♡ease ♡gratitude ♡compassion ♡ safety
Over time, these states become your new emotional set-point. In the evidence based research, this only takes 8 week from practicing 1-3 minutes three times a day.
For trauma survivors and people with long-term stress patterns, HeartMath helps:
It doesn’t deny your story or invalidate your pain. It simply helps you meet life with more internal support.
For those living with chronic fatigue, burnout, or exhaustion, HeartMath can:
Fatigue often comes from a system stuck in sympathetic overdrive. Coherence creates conditions for rest and recovery.
Pain becomes chronic when the brain’s danger pathways stay activated, even when the body is safe or the injury has healed. HeartMath helps by:
Many people find that as coherence increases, pain reduces. Not because they’re ignoring it, because we all know that never works! It melts away but because the threat response is finally softening so that your body can function how it is designed to.
♡ Stress Reduction & Emotional Regulation - Improves emotional self-regulation and reduces perceived stress and anxiety (HeartMath Institute, 2025)
♡ Autonomic Nervous System & Cardiovascular Health - Enhances heart rate variability (HRV) and parasympathetic activityLowers blood pressure and improves cardiovascular function
♡ Hormonal & Biological Stress Markers - Reduces cortisol and increases DHEA, improving resilience and energy
♡ Mental & Cognitive Health - Supports prefrontal cortex function: better focus, decision-making, memory, and emotional clarity. Reduces depression, anger, and fatigue; improves mood and resilience (HeartMath Institute, 2025)
♡ Chronic Pain & Neuroplastic Conditions - Reduces pain-stress cycles and limbic system hyperactivation. Supports recovery in chronic pain, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, PTSD (HeartMath Institute, 2025)
♡ Immune Function & Long-Term Health -Improves immune response and may protect against stress-related accelerated aging (HeartMath Institute, 2025)
♡ Potential Neuroprotective Effects - Early evidence suggests reductions in Alzheimer’s-related biomarkers with coherence training (HeartMath Institute, 2025)
HeartMath, like all of our practices in Befriend, doesn’t ask you to be positive all the time. It doesn’t deny your symptoms or minimise your suffering. And it doesn’t shame you for the emotional patterns you learned to survive. Instead, it offers a compassionate invitation to really notice in the present moment we do have choice, of how we meet the moment and ask:
“Let’s explore whether the emotional habits I practice, how I respond to my body and my life, are supporting the life I want.”
If they’re not…you do not judge or punish yourself. You put your energy into learning to support yourself in new ways. A good life is created through participation and willingness to stumble as you go and you grow. HeartMath is one of those ways. We teach more skills in Befriend that are simple and designed to become healthy habits that are part of life.
A Befriend We work with people ready to stop 'regulating their nervous system' and are ready to truly notice their patterns in daily life and begin to make tiny changes to support themselves that will have a big impact. This choice to step into the drivers seat of our life is a big part of what heals us. We are no longer a passive participant in life. We are influential in creating a life we enjoy. This is the difference between 'doing a program' and genuinely engaging to learn what we need and what works for us.
McCraty, R., Atkinson, M., Tomasino, D., & Bradley, R. (Year not specified). The Impact of a New Emotional Self‑Management Program on Stress, Emotions, Heart Rate Variability, DHEA and Cortisol. HeartMath Institute.
Wareing, L., Readman, M. R., Longo, M. R., Linkenauger, S. A., & Crawford, T. J. (2024). The Utility of Heartrate and Heartrate Variability Biofeedback for the Improvement of Interoception across Behavioural, Physiological and Neural Outcome Measures: A Systematic Review. Brain Sciences, 14(6), 579.
Sai Balaji, N., Plonka, N., Atkinson, M., Muthu, M., Ragulskis, M., Vainoras, A., & McCraty, R. (2025). Heart rate variability biofeedback in a global study of the most common coherence frequencies and the impact of emotional states. Scientific Reports, 15, 3241.
7Hirten, R., … (2024). [Title relating to mobile HRV / Inner Balance use and engagement in real-world settings]. JMIR Mental Health, 11, e55552. (This study uses the HeartMath Inner Balance sensor for HRV biofeedback via app.)
Lee, J.-S., … (2024). [Title relating to IVRM (interactive virtual reality mindfulness) participation & emotional regulation measured via ECG / HeartMath coherence]. Frontiers in Psychology. (This is a “Original Research” article using HeartMath coherence measures.)
Short-Term Effects of Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback on Working Memory. (2024). Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 49, 219–231.
Sai Balaji, N., Plonka, N., Atkinson, M., Muthu, M., Ragulskis, M., Vainoras, A., & McCraty, R. (2025). Heart rate variability biofeedback in a global study of the most common coherence frequencies and the impact of emotional states. Scientific Reports, 15, 3241.
.svg)
%20(1).jpg)
.jpg)
