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HMI’s research has found that a highly effective method for alleviating anxiety is engaging the heart’s intelligence to increase heart coherence. A practical way to this in minutes is establishing a smooth and balanced heart-rhythm pattern. A simple technique like HeartMath’s Heart-Focused Breathing® can help you to naturally create a smooth pattern.

You can build your coherence even more while breathing by putting a positive spin on how you feel about and perceive your thoughts and the situations in your life. This is as simple as intentionally focusing on a positive emotion such as appreciation, compassion or caring.

These two easy exercises help to synchronize the branches of the autonomic nervous system and heart-brain interactions. In simpler terms, they create a calming emotional shift.

Our repeated clinical trials with participants of all ages show improvements almost immediately and sustainable benefits with regular practice.

HMI researchers found in trials that one of the primary contributors to participants’ feelings of overwhelm was the amount of significance they assigned to the projects, situations and encounters in their lives. Rather than the challenges they were facing, it was this significance/importance that was causing them so much frustration and internal energy drain. (Overwhelm also is commonly experienced when we provide care to others for illness or injury or during the end-of-life stage and assign so much significance that our care turns into overcare.)
The natural solution, researched concluded, seemed to be for people to learn how to take the significance out, so our researchers worked with people experiencing overwhelm. They determined that shifting their emotions helped greatly.
Study participants experiencing a negative emotion such as frustration, fear or anxiety in relation to something in their lives were instructed to intentionally replace it with a positive one such as care, compassion or love. For most participants, this produced immediate benefits, especially relief and internal ease. Sustaining this emotional shift and benefit, of course, is a matter of practice, which many thousands of people have been doing for years.

Each of us has a supply of internal energy available on demand for the smallest tasks and the most arduous endeavours. This assumes, of course, all of our mental, emotional and physical systems are functioning properly – and we are resilient.
HMI defines resilience as the capacity to prepare for, recover from and adapt in the face of stress, adversity, trauma or tragedy. The resilient individual can bounce back and recuperate faster after a long day or week’s work, challenging situations or illnesses. Resiliency even gives us the capacity to neutralize and prevent some of life’s ongoing wear and tea, especially the kind that can weaken our immune system and lead to myriad health problems.
Take care of yourself and the rest will follow
The ultimate aim of HMI’s scientific research since 1991 of stress, emotions and heart-brain interactions has been finding ways people of all ages can improve their lives through self-care. We’ve made some important discoveries. Our research shows, for example, two forms of self-care that can help people experiencing burnout or fatigue are creating more heart-rhythm coherence and self-regulation of emotions.
These are complex internal processes studied by scientists around the world, but achieving their benefits can be simple. All you have to do is practice some easily learned tools a few minutes a day.

HMI researchers say stress creates incoherence in our heart rhythms, and when the heart is out of sync normal sleep patterns can be disrupted.
Coherence is a state of mental, emotional and physical synchronization and balance. It enables us to renew and sustain our energy, minimize fatigue and exhaustion, improve mental abilities and improve our sleep. It allows all of our systems to function properly and improves our ability to take charge of energy distribution and conservation in our daily activities.
Thus, HMI researchers say, it’s not the depletion of internal energy that helps us achieve beneficial sleep or even necessarily fall asleep. Rather, the ability to replenish, sustain and efficiently manage energy ultimately increases the capacity to reset our system for better sleep.

Our body is an amazing energy system, constantly expending, replenishing and storing energy. HMI research shows that we can take our energy system to a new level of efficiency by taking control of our emotions and creating heart-rhythm coherence. HMI studies revealed that negative emotions such as anger and anxiety or negative thoughts caused erratic and imbalanced heart-rhythm patterns while positive feelings like compassion or appreciation caused smooth and balanced heart-rhythm patterns.

Negative thoughts and feelings drain our energy and they sap the energy out of so many of the bodies’ processes, especially the immune system, putting our health at risk.
On the opposite, a simple act of compassion, performing a kindness for someone in need, or appreciating a loved one, makes us feel happiness and renewal.

According to workers, their jobs are stressing them mainly due to heavy workloads, too few breaks, too many hours, job insecurity, poor communication and cooperation. HMI’s research shows, however, that it is workers’ perceptions of workplace matters and their emotional responses to those perceptions that actually are raising their stress levels.
HMI has asked study participants experiencing a negative emotion – fear, for example – to make an emotional shift to a positive emotion. As soon as participants intentionally shifted to a positive emotion, an amazing thing happened: nearly everyone experienced an immediate sense of relief or well-being, or at the very least felt better than before the exercise. Most soon learned from researchers that whatever the new good feeling was, it corresponded to a marked change in their heart-rhythm patterns.