I’ve read that it indicates your heart’s ability to handle stressful stimuli, but I don’t understand why. Seems like you’d just want a steady heartbeat. Why isn’t high variation the same as arrhythmia?
ETA: a couple of articles I’ve read on the subject. They all say basically the same (no)thing.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heart-rate-variability-new-way-track-well-2017112212789
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/21773-heart-rate-variability-hrv
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate_variability
In: Biology
A healthy person will have more beat to beat variability because they respond better to the natural lulls and rises of activity during the day. The articles you’ve linked dumb it down into high and low HRV rather which I assume is just their way of saying “unhealthy people are chronically stressed/under active/whatever factor affects heart rhythms, so therefore day to day HRV is lower compared to healthy people.” . You can’t avoid every form of stress so it’s better your heart can cool itself down (leading to more variability) when it finds the time to.
Variation is not the same as arrhythmia. The first is a natural process that everyone’s heart goes through because of a bunch of reasons, including metabolism/hormone cycles. Arrhythmia is random gaps between beats that don’t follow a steady increase/decrease pattern, they just happen out of the blue from the perspective of an EKG.
I actually work in a neurophysiology lab that looks at the relationship between brain and cardiac health, I’m in charge of collecting and scoring HRV data. The real stuff is a bit more complex and relies on the ratios between varying frequencies.
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