Heart and Brain Coherence

The capacity or ability to modify your emotional responses is essential to your overall well-being and effectively contributes to everyday demands as well as eases your lifestyle and health, so today I would like to review the heart and brain coherence, in the sense as how science sees it, as well as in the practical terms for our everyday life journey.

Did you know (?!):

1 -That your heart sends many more signals to your brain than your brain sends to your heart?

2 -Your heart and brain are in constant communication, but your heart is doing much of the talking without you realizing?

3 -You have a “little brain” in your heart?

The saying “talk with your heart” is many times misunderstood - as the heart - and love - are popularly connected with romantic love; although it may be, it is not always the case.

If you don’t know yet about heart and brain coherence and the true meaning of “talk with your heart”, you will after reading through this article.

Research-based techniques done over the years at the HeartMath Institute in California, U.S.A.,founded in 1991, has offered the information needed to better understand and correlate with the thesis  - that the heart, as a source of emotion, courage and wisdom - with the physiological mechanisms - by which the heart and brain communicate and how the activity of the heart influences perceptions, emotions, intuition and overall health.

Dr. J. Andrew Armour of the University of Montreal, who first introduced the concept of a functional heart brain in 1991, found that the heart has an intrinsic nervous system of its own, containing around 40,000 neurons called sensory neurites.

Until the 1990s, scientists assumed and most people were taught and believed, that it was only the brain that sent information and issued commands to the heart; we now know that it is not so, as it truly works both ways!  It is a fact, the heart's complex inherent nervous system, called the “little brain” or the “heart brain”, is an sophisticated network of several types of neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells.

Since early nineties research has shown us that the heart communicates to the brain in several major ways and acts independently of the cranial brain, so the information has been out there, for whoever is interested in knowing and using it for better health and better life, but it is important to understand that the way the heart can speak to and influence the brain is when the heart is coherent - generating a stable rhythm. When this happens – when the heart rhythm is coherent - the body, including the brain, begins to experience all sorts of benefits, among them greater mental clarity and intuitive ability.

Research also shows that when you’re in a coherent heart rhythm, even your immune system is enhanced.

There is space for a discussion to emphasize the communication pathway between the heart and brain, as well as how these are related to cognitive and emotional function and self-regulatory capacity, as well as the assumption that self-induced positive emotions increase the coherence in bodily processes, which is reflected in the pattern of the heart’s rhythm. The shift in the heart rhythm in turn plays an important role in facilitating higher cognitive functions by creating emotional stability and facilitating states of calmness.

In time and over time, this shift establishes a new inner-baseline reference, a type of implicit memory that organizes perception, feelings, and behavior. Without establishing a new baseline reference, people are at risk of getting “stuck” in familiar, yet unhealthy emotional and behavioral patterns and living their lives through the automatic filters of past familiar or traumatic experience.

Many people are now feeling “stuck” with familiar old beliefs and find it quite difficult to get “unstuck”, mostly because they are so far from being truthful to themselves as they glide through life in automatic mode; amongst them are the so called people pleasers – the known “nice people” – the ones that fit in the category of doing everything for their image, instead of being true to themselves and their life purpose, or simply the ones living on denial.

There is always time, to make time for a change!

Having a much deeper scientific understanding that explains how and why heart activity affects mental clarity, creativity, emotional balance, intuition, general health and personal effectiveness, as well as the knowing that the heart is, in fact, a highly complex information-processing center with its own functional brain, that communicates with and influences the cranial brain via the nervous system, making changes in the hormonal system and other pathways, is at the least  - very important information to have and consider right now.

The influence this information on Heart and Brain Coherence has, in contributing to a major change in your life, by affecting the functions in most of your body’s major organs, plays an extremely important role in mental and emotional experience in the quality of your life.

Regular meditation helps obtaining  a systemic way of Heart and Brain Coherence, but in case you need some sort of a quick fix,  the HeartMath Institute offers a free quick technique in can undertake in a minute, and you may find it here.

Much Love and Light!