Control Your Heart Beat - Mentally and Psychologically

[Michael_Viggars]

It is important to understand that you cannot send a conscious message to your heart through a nerve or through hormone regulation. Your heart rate can be slowed indirectly by behavioural changes i.e. biofeedback.

[mhodges]

I was wondering the same thing. Wouldn't it be like trying to hold your breath until you die? Wouldn't your cardiovascular system be overridden by the autonomic system if you tried to slow your heartbeat past a healthy limit?

 

You can hold your breath until you black out without any threat of death. If you're hypoxic for over 4 minutes you are at risk of permanent brain injury, but simply losing consciousness doesn't imply brain damage. Black outs happens to freedivers during competitions all the time, as it happened to me while attempting to swim 90 meters underwater a couple weeks ago. In the case of a black out underwater of course there is risk of drowning which is why we never do these kinds of things without a trained rescue partner.

 

Here's a video you may enjoy

 

It shows yoga teacher Simon Borg-Olivier slowing his heart beat from 88 to 32 beats per minute in 45 seconds.

It is important to understand that you cannot send a conscious message to your heart through a nerve or through hormone regulation. Your heart rate can be slowed indirectly by behavioural changes i.e. biofeedback.

 

Why is this important to understand? I don't believe its even been proven to be true.

 

 

 

It appears that the subject can consciously raise his heart rate and blood pressure in both a graded and sudden fashion without a concurrent increase in ventilatory or metabolic function. This is likely achieved through conscious control of sympathetic nervous activation. This may also be combined with conscious inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system. ...

 

Interestingly, there seems to be a community of people that share the abilities described by our subject, namely the ability to focus their intention to do some or all of the following: a) increase heart rate, b) increase blood pressure, and c) dilate the pupils (http://forums.webmd.com/3/heart-disease-exchange/forum/5).

source http://depthinc.tumblr.com/post/45976648236/a-test-of-proof

 

 

 

[mhodges]

this paper describes and analyzes ways that enable a human to consciously and purposefully manage the frequency of heart contractions

"The sequence of the processes developing in the human central nervous system in the implementation of cardio-respiratory synchronization, may be represented by the following stages: (i) the perception of light or sound signal, which speci¯es the frequency of breathing and process evaluation of the signal; (ii) the formation of task to control the rate of breathing; (iii) reproduction of breathing rate in strict accordance with the frequency of the driving signal; (iv) the interaction of respiratory and cardiac centers in the brain; (v) synchronization of respiratory rhythms and cardiac centers; (vi) transmission of efferent signals to the heart from the brain via the vagus nerves; (vii) the interaction of signals arriving via the vagus nerves with rhythmogenical structures of the heart; (viii) heart reproduces rate signals -- the development of cardio-respiratory synchronization."

"...3.2. Heart rhythm management by means of arbitrary abdomen muscle tension.
The analysis of the falling heartbeat rate by means of arbitrary muscle tension was observed from a person who claimed to have the ability to arbitrary stop heart activity. During laboratory testing, the testee stopped his heart for 7 s; this was objectively registered on the electrocardiogram"

 

On the conscious control of the human heart

Vladimir M. Pokrovskii and Lily V. Polischuk, J. Integr. Neurosci. 11, 213 (2012). DOI: 10.1142/S0219635212500161

Edited August 4, 2013 by mhodges

[cihancyr]

Even from when i was young i fealth i can control something related to the heart.i tried exercicing that feeling i had and increase what i fealth.I later realized that i can control my heartbeat in a way that many people where shocked when i showed them.Standing totaly motionless and without controling my breath or thinking about stuff wich was mentioned earlier by a member(sex, sport ,violence) i can almoust double my hart rate in just a few seconds(5sec) .If someone reads this and thinks that this is something interesting and i could take some more study tests or use this for something productive please contact me.thank's to all

Hello i'm from Turkey and i was searching for controlling heartbeat. When i read your note i was very surprised because i have feeling like you. I've searched lots of time on the internet to learn if this is an ability or not. I couldn't find anything. İ have this feeling when i was a child. I can increase my heartbeat without any exciting ideas or any other things. i can't define it but when i do that i feel weard. in a few seconds it increases form 60 to 90 not as much as yours but i know that feeling. it is like you leave your body free.. if you searched it and found anything you can send me by replying this post.

[Velocity_Boy]

On 12/20/2006 at 9:33 AM, SamDept said:

Hey

 

Is there any way (and i don't mean by exercise) to lower your heart beat Mentally or Psychologically?

For example; You want to try and get your heart beat to around 50BPM but not for a loong period of time, just for say a few minutes ?!

 

Thanks

I'm currently a Certified Fitness Trainer..and my degree is in psychology..so this baby is right up my alley.

As others have said,,,yeah...you CAN raise and lower your heart rate with your thoughts. As far as elevating the BPM...how high you get it really depends upon how adept you are at conjuring excitory thoughts. The trick is that you need to make yourself believe or at least feel as if what you're thinking about.....sex, fighting, being chased down by Freddy Kruger...is really happening. Obviously some of us are more proficient at this than are others. And again, practice will help.

Same Dynamics are at work for lowering your BPM. In this case, calm and relaxing thoughts. The old adage about...Going to your Happy Place. LOL. It's been widely reported and verified that Eastern holy men types...or anyone very practiced at sitting meditation...can lower their HR to about 10-15 BPM!

But I think there is a caveat to the notion of just becoming really good at calming meditation will drop your HR to half or even less of your normal resting HR. And that is......your overall physical fitness level. Especially your cardio or aerobic level. You probably know that the more elite endurance athletes such as swimmers, runners, cyclists, and triathletes have uber low resting HR s. I believe Michael Phelps s is around 50. So, yeah, like it or not your fit level is gonna play a significant role in how low you can get your HR. As for raising it....not so much. That's more mind dependant.

There's a genetic component as well. Done elite endurance athletes who are every bit as fit as a Phelps or a Scott Jurek just cannot get their resting HR below, say, the mid-60s. The heart had it's own organic bioelectric pacemakers that sit stop both upper Chambers. I think they're called AV nodes. Well, those apparently can be effected by good old DNA. In this case, no matter how fit and how good you get started meditation.... Michael Phelps crossed with the dalai llama!...you ain't gonna get down to those crazy low teens or twenty something numbers.