chapter 2

Your Heart and Brain

The Power of Working Together

Now we’re going to give you the inside scoop on managing your emotions, and how the heart and brain talk to each other! It’s really important stuff to understand if you genuinely want less stress around challenging situations and more fun in your life. Research has shown that getting the heart and brain in sync can lead to better decision making—and even better test scores.

Some of what we will talk about may not be in your science book (at least not yet), but it’s important for transforming your stress. As you read, try to relate what we talk about to your day-to-day life. That’s what really counts because it will help make a difference for you in managing your stress.

The Heart-Brain Connection

So why are we talking about your heart in a book that aims to reduce your stress? Scientists have discovered that your heart actually has its own little brain, which neurocardiologists (specialists who study how the heart and brain work together) call the heart-brain. The heart-brain is not as complex as the brain in your head, but, like the brain in your head, it has lots of neurons, ganglia, and neurotransmitters, and it produces hormones. It also has the ability to sense all kinds of things going on in your body, and it performs other functions that also go on in the brain.

What’s fascinating is that your heart and brain actually “talk” to each other all the time. It’s like a two-way street between the brain in your head and the brain in your heart. The communication “street” between your heart and brain is called the autonomic nervous system, or ANS for short. The ANS, which has two branches, not only carries messages between your heart and brain, but it also regulates over 90 percent of all the things that happen automatically in your body—things like breathing, digestion, immune system function, and much more. Surprisingly, your heart sends more information to your brain than your brain sends to your heart! It’s something most people are not aware of. Even many doctors are surprised when they hear that the heart sends lots of information to the brain. New research on optimal performance clearly shows that the quality of the signals sent by the heart has a powerful effect on the quality of that communication and whether our brain functions well or not.

We’re going to show you how you can improve the communication between your heart and brain, which in turn can enhance your ability to think clearly and respond to challenges (life’s day-to-day stuff) in a more intelligent way. We’ll also teach you a new technique—the Quick Coherence technique—that will help you do just that.

Heart Rhythms

It has been known for a long time that your emotions affect your heart, specifically what are called your heart rhythms. Heart rhythms reflect the natural speeding up and slowing down of individual heartbeats. A look at heart rhythms shows if the speeding up and slowing down is happening in a “smooth” way or if it’s chaotic.

Research at the HeartMath Institute Research Center shows that depleting emotions such as frustration, anger, anxiety, impatience, fear, and sadness—the ones that drain your inner battery, make you feel lousy, and show up when you’re stressed—create a chaotic heart rhythm pattern. That chaotic signal goes straight to your brain and prevents the smart-thinking part of your brain from…well…being smart! People even say, “I’m so mad, I can’t think straight!” And indeed that’s the case. The chaotic signals also affect the part of your brain that has to do with self-regulation, which can contribute to making it difficult to handle situations effectively when you’re upset about something.

On the other hand, emotions that feel good to you and recharge your inner battery—renewing emotions such as kindness, care, courage, appreciation, joy, and patience—create a smooth and ordered heart rhythm pattern. You feel more balanced, think more clearly, and have greater ability to handle stressful situations with a lot less emotional drama.

To illustrate the effect emotions have on your heart rhythms, take a look at the graphs below. These are graphs of the heart rhythms of someone who was hooked up to equipment that measures these rhythms. The graphs were taken just moments apart, but they look very different, right? What do you see in those graphs? Based on what we just said about emotions creating different heart rhythm patterns, in which graph do you think the person was feeling frustrated? In which one do you think the person was feeling appreciation?

If you said that the top graph shows the heart rhythms when the person was feeling frustrated, you are absolutely correct. Doesn’t it look like the way frustration feels? The chaotic pattern is what scientists call an incoherent heart rhythm. It looks like static!

The bottom graph shows the heart rhythms when the person was feeling appreciation. It looks like smooth, rolling hills and valleys. Just by looking at it, doesn’t it give you more of a “smoother,” calmer feeling? Scientists call this a coherent heart rhythm. So why is this important?

It’s important because the pattern of your heart rhythms indicates the quality of the signals traveling between your heart and brain through the wires (the neural circuitry) of your autonomic nervous system—that two-way street that we talked about earlier. These signals can affect how well your brain works—or doesn’t work. When you are mad, anxious, or worried, for example, your heart rhythm pattern looks like the top graph: herky-jerky and chaotic. That herky-jerky pattern impacts your brain. You can think of it like static in your brain, creating foggy thinking. It also means you may blurt out something because you’re mad, but that you may later regret saying. The technical term for this is called cortical inhibition. It simply means that the cortex, which is the thinking part of your brain, is offline.

One student said, “It’s hard for me to perform well at anything when I’m overly anxious. When I learned to manage my emotions, I performed better overall in my schoolwork and got along better with other people. It’s almost impossible to understand information when I’m too anxious or overwhelmed.”

A good example of cortical inhibition is when you feel nervous or anxious taking a test. If you’ve ever had that happen, wasn’t it difficult to think clearly? Once the test was over you may have said to yourself, I can’t believe I forgot that and I marked the wrong answer! Or, in another situation, have you ever been so angry or overwhelmed that you couldn’t think straight and nasty or hurtful words just flew out of your mouth? It feels that way because it is that way. Your brain can’t think as clearly, and you can end up doing and saying things that you later regret or that even get you into trouble. Said more plainly, stress can make you say or do stupid things! Then you have to expend energy to “clean up” the mess you just made, which drains your resilience.

If, however, you feel more patience, confidence, appreciation, courage, enthusiasm, care, or happiness, for example, your heart rhythms become smoother and more coherent. Naturally, your brain will then function better and you will make better decisions. When your heart and brain are in sync, that creates what scientists call cortical facilitation. That means the part of your brain that does the thinking and analyzing—the cortex—is functioning optimally. These signals are also sent to your entire body, which helps your glands and organs work together more efficiently and effectively. You even have better coordination and faster reaction times, which is why being “in sync” is so important in sports.

So, how do you get your heart and brain in sync? How do you develop those coherent heart rhythms? Let’s take a closer look now at how to get your heart and brain to work together.

Coherence: Heart and Brain Working Together

Coherence is an important term that describes when things work together efficiently or perform optimally. Coherence, as discussed above, is when your heart and brain work together and are in sync. As a result, depleting emotions don’t determine how you handle a situation. Coherence isn’t only about heart rhythms. Think for a moment about a flock of birds that are flying together in formation, for example. Even though there may be hundreds or even thousands of them, they move together almost as if they were one organism. We could say they fly in a “coherent” way. Can you imagine what it would be like if a flock of birds didn’t fly together as though they were one? They would be bumping into one another, and they probably would not get where they are going very efficiently. Most likely, they would have a lot of feathers missing, too!

Like a flock of birds, a soccer or football team needs to work or move together in a coherent way to get the ball down the field to set up for a chance to score. A group project goes more smoothly when each person does his or her part to get it done.

Another example of coherence is a sentence where all of the words come together so that they make sense. If you have to give a presentation to your class, you’ll need to talk coherently if you want to get a good grade. You want to talk intelligently about your topic. However, if you’re really nervous about talking in front of people—which is true for many people, adults included—try as you might, the words get tangled up on your tongue and they just won’t come out in a way that makes sense. That increases your anxiety and you get more tongue-tied. Your words likely will form incoherent sentences. Have you ever had that happen to you? You may have even said to yourself that your brain was offline—and sure enough, it was. Feeling anxious and nervous creates incoherent heart rhythms, and those chaotic signals get sent to your brain!

But it’s not only your brain that is affected when you feel anxious, nervous, or overwhelmed and your heart rhythms become incoherent—your whole body is stressed, too. You’re draining your energy because the signals in your nervous system are out of sync. Those feelings also make it more difficult to be in charge of how you respond in a situation. So, how do you stop the stressful emotions that keep you out of sync?

It begins by realizing and understanding that you can put the brakes on stressful feelings. Then it takes committing and remembering to “take charge” of how you respond along with getting and staying coherent more often. Lots of research shows that using the techniques in this book to help you self-regulate and to self-generate healthy, renewing emotions can lead to improvements like these:

As we said earlier, renewing emotions naturally create more coherent or smooth heart rhythms. Renewing emotions are the ones that feel good, such as joy, enthusiasm, appreciation, care, peace, love, kindness, or courage. However, and this is important, the power of a renewing emotion comes not simply from thinking about it but from feeling or experiencing it. Let’s take a closer look at what we mean by that.

Usually, with a renewing emotion, something happens and it makes you feel good inside. For example, you buy a new outfit and wearing it makes you feel confident. Or you come home and your dog greets you, slobbers all over your face, and wants to play—and you feel a lot of love for him. Or perhaps you do well on a test, make a sports team, or a friend helps you with a project, and you feel happy, proud, or appreciative. These are all examples of things happening “outside” that make you feel good inside.

It’s important to know, though, that you don’t have to rely on something happening outside to make you feel good inside—and we’re going to show you how to do this. Although it’s an important life skill, it’s something that most people are not taught how to do. Because your heart affects your brain—remember that two-way street between your heart and your brain—and your brain strongly affects your body, in order to stop stress reactions in their tracks, you need to shift your heart rhythms from an incoherent, jagged pattern to one that is ordered and coherent. How do you do this? You shift from experiencing a depleting emotion to experiencing a renewing one.

To help you learn how to do this, recall a time when you were doing something that you really enjoyed or that was meaningful to you. Perhaps you felt happy because you scored a goal, or maybe you experienced a feeling of accomplishment or satisfaction for doing well on a test or finishing a project. Perhaps a friend, your sibling, or someone else did something nice and unexpected for you, which you really appreciated. Or it might have been the feeling of love or care you had for your dog or cat, or feeling peaceful, calm, or content when you were outside in a park or in nature.

Take a few moments to think about this. Then, in your notebook, make a list of situations, places, or events when you have experienced a renewing emotion. See if you can also name the emotion or feeling you experienced. Writing them down can help anchor them in your memory, and you are more likely to remember them when you are stressed out. Here are some examples:

Situation, Place, Event Renewing Emotion

Playing with my dog

Happiness, love

Getting a good test score

Satisfaction, confidence

Hanging out with my best friend

Appreciation, fun

Being out in nature

Calm, peaceful

Listening to music I like

Content, happy, inspired

Learning that a test was postponed until next week

Relief

Having someone stand up for you

Safe, accepted, appreciated

Each of the renewing emotions in the examples above helps create coherence. Let’s put one of those renewing emotions that you identified and wrote in your notebook to work for you right now in the Quick Coherence technique.

Quick Coherence Technique

The Quick Coherence technique builds on Heart-Focused Breathing, which you learned in chapter 1. In addition to breathing, you reexperience or relive one of the renewing emotions you wrote down on your list. For example, let’s say you feel love when your dog greets you after school. If you’re at school, obviously your dog can’t be there with you. But you know the feeling of love for your dog. So even though your dog isn’t there with you, go ahead and feel that feeling of love, just like you do when he greets you when you come home.

“I was feeling anxious before my math test. I wanted to feel calm so I did Quick Coherence and did the best I could to feel the calm feeling while I did the breathing. I remembered how I feel calm when I listen to quiet music, so I tried to experience that calm feeling again before the test. It took about three minutes to really feel calmer, but I kept trying and it worked.”

Quick Coherence is a great name for this technique because, by practicing it, you can quickly reduce your stress, stop energy drains, and get more coherent. Your heart rhythms also become coherent—your heart and brain are in sync. The Quick Coherence technique enables you to act from your heart rather than react from unmanaged emotions, which is key to managing stress.

Technique: Quick Coherence

Step 1: Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Breathing a little slower and deeper than usual, imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area. Do this for one minute or more.

Step 2: Now, make a sincere attempt to experience a renewing emotion, such as appreciation or care for someone or something in your life. Do this for one minute or more.

Here are a few helpful tips to get the most out of the Quick Coherence technique.

Now try the Quick Coherence technique for one to two minutes, following steps 1 and 2 above.

After trying the Quick Coherence technique, notice if you feel any calmer. What else do you notice? Do you have less mind chatter? Do you feel less distracted and more focused? Is your body more relaxed? Have your shoulders dropped a bit? The things you notice may seem small, but pay attention to them because they all add up. Write down in your notebook anything that you notice. And don’t forget, you are the one who made these changes happen!

At first, some people try too hard when they do the Quick Coherence technique. They might wonder, Am I doing it right? Am I thinking about appreciating my friend, or am I really feeling appreciation? Which source of appreciation should I choose—my dog, my friend, or my favorite grandmother? Do I still have mind chatter? What are the steps? It takes a little practice to get the hang of it. The more you do it, though, the easier it becomes.

As you can see, the Quick Coherence technique is quite simple. But when the heat is on, it can be challenging to do it in the moment when you need it the most. Just like anything worthwhile you do, it takes practice. After all, you probably didn’t ride your bike smoothly the first time you got on it. You likely had training wheels, and then when the training wheels came off, someone held on to the seat as you pedaled to help you balance. Once you practiced enough, you found your balance and off you went all by yourself. The same can happen with the Quick Coherence technique.

Take a few minutes to think about times when doing the Quick Coherence technique might be helpful. Write your ideas in your notebook. Here are some suggestions:

Be sure to come up with a plan of how you will remind yourself to practice Quick Coherence. Some people find it helps to write reminders on sticky notes and put them on their bathroom mirror, refrigerator, locker door, or in their school notebook—somewhere you will see them often. Some people set alarms on their cell phones to go off as reminders. See what creative ways you can come up with that make sense to you.

Sometimes it may seem like not much is going on when you shift into a coherent state, but there really is a lot happening. It’s a bit like your cell phone. Let’s say you plug your cell phone in to recharge it. It doesn’t seem like much is happening. After all, your phone just lies there on your desk, quietly charging. If you want to be able to use it later, you leave it plugged in so it will have a full charge. When you’re in a coherent state, you are charging up your vitality and inner battery so you have more reserves, more energy to draw on when you need it later on.

Before going on, it’s important that we acknowledge that many teens face some very difficult situations; maybe you’re one of those teens. Because of that, you may find it more difficult to experience a renewing emotion. After all, when you’re really angry, anxious, afraid, or sad, a renewing emotion might seem impossible to feel in that moment. You are just trying to survive! We understand that. In moments like these, do Heart-Focused Breathing. That can lower some of the emotional intensity and can help make the situation more manageable. We’ll introduce another coherence-building technique in chapter 4 called Attitude Breathing, which some people find helpful when their emotions are intense.

Transforming Stress: Heart-Brain Coherence in Action

Now we’ll take a look at how your brain and heart can promote coherence by working together. How well they work together has a whole lot to do with whether you feel a lot of stress or not. Let’s see how heart-brain coherence worked for sixteen-year-old Danielle when she was faced with a tough situation at home.

When my parents first told me that they were going to split up, my heart wanted badly for them to be okay because I love them so much and I didn’t want them to suffer. I started thinking about their separation and that triggered some different emotions. I was afraid of the future and kept remembering all the good times we had experienced in the past, which I thought would be lost forever. The more I thought, the more intense my emotions got. Soon I was totally lost in an ocean of overwhelming emotions and felt completely confused. I let my emotions of fear, disappointment, and loss get so blown up that I couldn’t even talk about how deeply I cared about them and the love I had for them. Instead, when I would try to talk to them, I would get more frustrated and angry, and it would end up in a mess of misunderstanding. After wearing myself out from these strong emotions, I finally had nowhere else to go but to my heart.

I started seeing that the best way to talk to my parents would only be if I kept my emotions under control. When I did this, I had more clarity and could say what I really felt in my heart—that I was scared and sad and didn’t know what to do. They could then better understand what I really felt and wanted to say to them. My relationship with them became more of what I wanted as I kept practicing this every time I talked with them. I was still sad, but together we could have a better conversation without blame and emotion getting in the way.

Emotions by themselves are not good or bad. They can add meaning to our lives and lighten the load we sometimes feel like we’re carrying. But if we don’t keep them balanced and under control, they can easily create confusion, lack of self-confidence, or uncertainty and give us a real energy-burning workout.

As we saw in Danielle’s story, thoughts can trigger all sorts of emotions—such as anger, hurt, and anxiety—that don’t feel good. But when you get your heart and brain working together as Danielle did, then your thoughts and emotions can work for you instead of against you.

Here’s another example to help you understand how the brain and heart work together—or don’t, as the case may be! This is seventeen-year-old Jonathan’s story:

About a month ago, I was late getting to school every day for four days. My first period teacher was on my case and finally gave me a tardy notice. On Friday morning, I made sure I was ready so I could get there on time. I was on the way to school when we got caught in a traffic jam. The way the traffic was moving, I knew it was going to take a lot longer to get to school. I started thinking, I’ll never make it on time! The one day I make an extra effort, and now this! I felt like giving everyone the finger and yelling and swearing. I felt frustrated and impatient, and I just knew my teacher wouldn’t believe me.

All that emotion was rising inside me. I realized I was wasting a lot of energy on something—the traffic jam—that I couldn’t change in that moment. I was also making an assumption about my teacher’s reaction before I explained it to her. About the only thing I could change was to go to my heart and realize that I’m here and I just have to wait for the traffic to move. When I get to school, I’ll explain what happened. Just remembering to go to my heart helped me feel calmer. In my heart, I knew that reacting wouldn’t make the traffic move faster. So why feel uptight and start my day off with an edgy feeling? Besides, I remembered hearing that doctors and scientists have proven that when your emotions go into negative reactions, certain hormones are released that have a bad effect on your body. That reactive energy can build up over time and cause health problems. By taking a moment to remember to go to my heart, I saw the situation in a new way. My heart said, Hey, maybe this traffic jam could be used for a little time to slow down and get calm. The rest of the day will be really busy. Then I could handle the rest of my day, talking with my teacher, and whatever else might come up.

As you can see in Jonathan’s story, he could respond in two different ways: (1) react, get angry, and yell at the driver whose flat tire or accident caused the traffic jam, or (2) calm down, get more balanced, and make peace with the situation. His story illustrates how you actually do have a choice in how you respond.

When you’re upset about something, it’s really not the issue or situation itself that’s bothering you or causing the inner turmoil. It’s the emotional importance or “significance” that you give the issue that determines the feeling of stress. You feel upset because your mind and emotions interpret the facts of the issue in a certain way and you assign it personal meaning. Here’s an example:

At school, you go to your locker and two guys are talking nearby. You hear one guy talking about how upset he is because he didn’t make the team and how unfair it is that someone else did. According to the guy speaking, the people who made the team are just not as talented as he is. You keep listening to how upset he is and all the reasons why he should have made the team instead of the others. It is obvious that he’s really upset. As you listen, you probably don’t feel those same feelings of being upset because you have not made the issue personal. You may even think, I can understand why he’s upset, but it seems he’s making it a much bigger deal than it really is. And yet, to him, it is a big deal because making the team means a lot to him. As we learned earlier, the heart and the brain are connected. So, all of this guy’s depleting emotions were being communicated from his heart to his brain, resulting in incoherent heart rhythms—those herky-jerky, chaotic rhythms that we saw on that graph earlier in the chapter. Without knowing it, his depleting emotions were causing wear and tear on his body, including the dumping of stress hormones into it.

When you compare the first two stories above with this last one, you can see that it’s the meaning you give to a situation that causes the inner turmoil and upset. The more you feed the issue with all the head thoughts and justifications, the bigger it gets—and that keeps you from being able to see the situation clearly. Sometimes the meaning you give to a situation is linked to something that happened earlier in your life—what we call emotional memories.

The Challenge of Emotional Memories

We’ve talked about the importance of taking charge of your emotions so that you not only can better handle stressful situations but so you can also feel better and enjoy life more. But even with your best efforts, does it ever feel like emotions “just happen” and you get hijacked by them?

Let’s talk briefly again about your equipment upstairs—your brain. With a better understanding about how your brain works, you’ll see that emotional memories can trigger a lightning-fast emotional reaction that can pack a powerful punch, seemingly out of nowhere. Have you ever had that happen? Many times these automatic reactions, however, are not an appropriate or best way to respond to the current situation. When you get triggered in this way—it happens to everyone at one time or another—it can be an unexpected jolt that leaves you feeling stressed out. More than likely, you don’t handle the situation very well because your smart-thinking brain has gone offline.

Let’s look closer at what happens. Emotional memories can be triggered by something that is happening now that is similar to something that happened in the past, even years ago. You might not even consciously remember what happened in the past. The feeling pops in so fast that your brain doesn’t have time to understand what’s different about the current situation and the situation in the past. Without thinking, you react. More than likely, you don’t handle the current situation very well.

When you experience a strong emotion, a part of your brain remembers it, along with details connected with the event. For example, if a “big guy” bullied you in the past and you were angry and fearful in response to being bullied, you may feel those same feelings when you see other “big guys”—even if they are nice people with no intent to bully you. The smell of a hot dog might make you sick to your stomach because you came down with the stomach flu after eating one in the past. You may be afraid of dogs because when you were little a big dog barked and scared you, even if you don’t remember it. In each case, an emotional memory was formed and “stored” in your brain. It’s called the “fast-track brain circuit” because it happens faster than you can think about what’s happening and you simply react.

There is another track called the “slow-track circuit” in your brain. Here the information about the “big guy” goes through a different brain pathway that lets you know that this guy is actually friendly and there is no reason to feel afraid. However, even if this happens, the feeling of fear that was triggered through the fast track has already sent signals causing your heart rhythms to become incoherent as well as stress hormones to be released into your body.

These two circuits operate continuously and simultaneously. Anytime you are triggered, Heart-Focused Breathing can quickly put the brakes on the fast-track, automatic response. If you do this often enough, you can stop the old, automatic fast-track responses like anger or anxiety, and gradually you may find that you can replace those old responses with calm or confidence, which then becomes your new automatic response. Of course, there are going to be some reactions that will take several attempts to stop the momentum of the automatic response, but getting back to balance sooner is a big step. Because the old response may have been around a long time, it will take practice, but don’t underestimate even a little progress! Any progress you make is important and builds the foundation for more progress and for lasting change.

You’ve also learned the Quick Coherence technique, which can be effective to stop automatic responses. Most important is to choose a technique and use it! It takes practice at first, but each time you practice a technique, you build your self-control muscle, which will make practicing it more effective.

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So now you can see that depleting emotions not only feel lousy and drain your inner battery (and therefore your resilience), but they also create incoherence in your heart rhythms that in turn affects how clearly you think, communicate, and make decisions. All too often messes are created when we respond reactively. On the other hand, you can build your resilience by generating renewing emotions—which recharge your battery—with the Quick Coherence technique; by doing this, you can shift gears from depletion to inner renewal. You will feel better and be able to handle situations more effectively. All in all, it’s important to recognize that you have a choice of how to respond to any situation and that the more resilience you build, the better you will be able to handle daily challenges, including making better decisions.

In the next chapter, we’re going to introduce a tool called the Emotional Landscape. It can help you see how the wide range of emotions you experience affects your body. It’s a valuable tool you’ll be able to use every day.

Your Stress-Bustin’, Resilience-Boostin’, On-the-Go Action Plan

  1. Pay attention every day to what you are feeling, especially feelings that drain your inner battery. Remember, it’s not just the big emotional reactions that drain your battery. Pay attention to the smaller ones, such as feeling bored, withdrawn, sad, lonely, or even what feels like a minor frustration. Those quiet drains can really add up. Noticing your emotions is an ongoing practice because it helps you become more aware of them. Once you are aware of them, you can use the techniques in this book to take charge of how you handle them.
  2. Practice the Quick Coherence technique several times every day. Practice it when you don’t feel any stress so that doing the technique becomes easier and more automatic. Especially practice using Quick Coherence as soon as you start to feel any depleting emotion.
    1. How will you remind yourself to practice the Quick Coherence technique throughout the day? Any kind of reminder is really helpful, including placing sticky notes where you will see them, setting an alarm on your phone, or creating a daily routine such as practicing in the car, right after lunch, every time you see a teacher who bothers you, or before a specific class.
    2. Pay attention to how you feel after you use the technique. Write this down in your notebook.
  3. For the situation that you committed to “taking on” at the end of chapter 1, use the Quick Coherence technique. Practice shifting your depleting emotions to a renewing emotion when dealing with this situation.