How I beat overwhelm: Tracking my heart rate left me feeling like a frustrated failure
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Biofeedback devices promised a whole new world of mental and physical harmony. They did change my life, but not in the way I’d hoped. I love to run, but ask me about my running times or distances and I will have no idea. For me, running is about squeezing exercise into a busy schedule, clearing my head and being in nature. I don’t need to measure it.
![[Amy Fleming]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2021/06/29/Amy_Fleming.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
But unfortunately I am not immune to the oh-so-pleasing dopamine injection of unboxing a new bit of wearable tech, personalising the app for hours and thinking this might just change my life – the new, calmer, fitter, stronger, smarter me dangling tantalisingly within reach. One such scenario occurred after researching the importance of human connection on mental and physical health: less stress, less inflammation, less illness. Human connection, I learned, can stimulate and be facilitated by the vagus nerve – a primitive part of the nervous system.
Naturally, this research segued into subreddits, podcasts, scientific studies and, eventually, wearable tech that would hack the vagus nerve to achieve mental and physical harmony. I was genuinely excited that I might have found a possible route to being calmer. Vagus nerve activity, it turned out, could be measured by detecting a person’s heart rate variability (HRV) and stimulated with specific breathing exercises.
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