Dr Ravi Solanki earned a medical degree and PhD at Cambridge University and worked in an intensive care unit during the pandemic. But it wasn\u2019t until last year, not long after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area for the artificial intelligence company he runs, that he paid attention to heart rate variability, or HRV.<\/p>\n
Suddenly he was surrounded by techies and began wearing a wristband that tracks health and fitness data, per the local custom. He learned that HRV \u2013 basically a measure of how uneven your heart rate is \u2013 is correlated with brain and body health and became preoccupied with improving his.<\/p>\n
On his roughly 30-member team, \u201ca lot of people have Whoops,\u201d Solanki said, referring to the wristband. \u201cAs a group, we compare them. It\u2019s quite fun, quite unifying as well. We help each other \u2013\u2018What can we do to help performance on HRV?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
As wearable devices like Fitbits and Apple Watches proliferated over the past decade or two, many people began calibrating their health and wellness regimens to improve how their bodies function. But in recent years, more and more gadget geeks have focused such biohacking efforts on their performance not just at the gym but at the office as well. The once eccentric quest for immortality is becoming a fixture of the 9-to-5 hustle.<\/p>\n
The trend has spawned a cottage industry of coaches and gurus who train white-collar workers to raise their HRV, or help companies train employees to boost theirs. Software makers have created dashboards that allow a company\u2019s HRV coach to track and analyse employees\u2019 data, and to share teamwide averages with company managers. Matt Bennett, a founder of Optimal HRV, which makes one such dashboard, said subscriptions to the service had increased more than tenfold since 2020, to more than 4,000.<\/p>\n
Increasingly, it seems, white-collar workers who want to get ahead are obsessing over their HRV. Tim Ferriss, an influencer and the author of \u201cThe 4-Hour Workweek,\u201d has said he first learned about HRV from a friend who \u201cworks with a lot of the best-performing investors in the finance world.\u201d He added, \u201cThey all use HRV.\u201d<\/p>\n
Should they?<\/p>\n
Fitness Tracking Enters the Workplace<\/p>\n
To the uninitiated, having a more variable heart rate may seem like a looming disaster, a sensation you recall just before passing out and waking up strapped to a gurney.<\/p>\n
In fact, greater heart rate variability \u2013 a heart that beats not every second on the dot but after, say, 1.1 seconds, then 1.05 seconds, then 0.95, then 1 \u2013 tends to reflect physiological resilience. A person with higher HRV can recover his or her equilibrium more quickly after being startled than a person with low HRV.<\/p>\n
HRV is also a fairly reliable barometer of overall health: It will typically drop when someone is eating or sleeping poorly, or overtaxing the body.<\/p>\n
(Heart arrhythmia, a potentially serious medical condition, can express itself in similar ways, but its changes in heart rate tend to be more erratic.)<\/p>\n
While biohacking has long been popular in the tech world, a growing number of performance optimisers appear to work in law, marketing and other fields. Many people who responded to a recent New York Times questionnaire said they had gotten into measuring HRV through their interest in health and wellness.<\/p>\n
Dr. Scott Braunstein, the chief medical officer of Sollis Health, which provides a concierge service for urgent health care, said that HRV readings measured during sleep were most accurate and that factors like food intake or exercise influenced readings taken during the day.<\/p>\n
For some white-collar workers, the sensitivity of HRV is precisely its allure.<\/p>\n
When Pete Zelles started making presentations to senior executives at the large telecom company where he worked, the anxiety would make him light-headed. An avid runner and cyclist, he decided to enlist his wearables to fix the problem.<\/p>\n
He eventually settled on a regimen of exercising moderately in the morning of his presentations and staying on his feet beforehand to burn off nervous energy. Still, he ultimately hopes to do something even more valuable with the data from his wearables: Feed it into AI tools that can \u201creveal deeper truths and predictive guidance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Does Improving HRV Mean Better Health?<\/p>\n
To help clients raise their HRV, some consultants train them to breathe at a slow, steady rate known as the \u201cresonance frequency\u201d for several minutes a day. The resonance frequency varies from person to person, said Inna Khazan, a clinical and performance psychologist at Harvard Medical School, but generally means inhaling and exhaling three and a half to seven times a minute.<\/p>\n
A lawyer at a financial firm who did not want to draw attention to her employer said she had raised her HRV by working on her breathing with Khazan and felt it had sharpened her mental acuity. This is in line with studies indicating that these techniques can improve executive function and conditions like depression, though some of the research is at an early stage or in need of more rigour.<\/p>\n
Other experts question whether it makes sense to focus directly on improving HRV, as opposed to emphasising overall health and resilience to stress.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe could starve ourselves and our heart rate would be low, HRV would be high,\u201d said Marco Altini, a data scientist who focuses on physiology. \u201cBut that would not be a good condition.\u201d (Altini nonetheless agrees that breathing techniques can help reduce anxiety.)<\/p>\n
Whatever the case, such HRV coaching is becoming a lucrative business, with clients in technology, law, finance, large corporations and the front offices of professional sports teams.<\/p>\n
Fizziness in Your Body<\/p>\n
In December, Leah Lagos, a performance psychologist and HRV specialist, mailed me a laptop and two sensors so she could find my resonance breathing frequency and walk me through the virtues of breathing at that rate for 15 minutes twice a day.<\/p>\n
Lagos said she worked with professional athletes, corporate executives, hedge fund managers and law firm partners, among others. In her view, highly skilled white-collar workers are \u201cbiological athletes\u201d who should strive to optimise their \u201ccognitive self,\u201d and she said regular breath work could make this happen more consistently.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe your peak is from 8am to 2pm,\u201d she said. \u201cBut then this gives you another two or three hours.\u201d<\/p>\n
After she calculated my baseline HRV, she set up an electronic pacer on the laptop monitor that alternated between four- and six-second intervals. She instructed me to breathe in through my nose during the shorter interval and out through my mouth during the longer one.<\/p>\n
When we finished, my HRV had increased substantially according to the numbers on the screen. \u201cMost people notice the activity of their minds, the clarity \u2013 that\u2019s usually the first sign of resonance,\u201d she told me. \u201cAnother is that people say they feel a fizziness in their body.\u201d I had to admit that I felt kind of fizzy.<\/p>\n
Still, it can be hard not to wonder if all the biohacking has become excessive. Among the people I spoke with, HRV was often just the tip of the iceberg. Some said that they had multiple devices \u2013 watches, rings, wristbands, continuous glucose monitors \u2013 or that they tried to optimise their readings as if playing a video game. Or they used them to determine what time of day they should do their most taxing work and rearranged their schedules accordingly.<\/p>\n
Michelle Cicale, an executive assistant at a financial services company, said she used an infrared sauna and red light to help improve her HRV, which she tracks with an Apple Watch. She said she had decided to limit her biohacking to a handful of rituals after seeing friends overdo it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve watched people go insane from this,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
For those who have anxiety \u2013 and, really, who among us doesn\u2019t? \u2013 monitoring the watches and rings can become a compulsion.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat this technology has done is it\u2019s become an addiction for them, a kind of reassurance-seeking behaviour,\u201d said Bonnie Zucker, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who specialises in health anxiety and panic disorder. She said checking the devices was not unlike repeatedly washing hands or making sure a door is locked: It may briefly soothe, but can quickly become pathological.<\/p>\n
And all of this is happening as artificial intelligence moves in on white-collar jobs, which may only heighten the anxiety to perform better at work. A handful of the biohackers I spoke with worked in AI or, like Zelles, were keenly aware of its rapid improvement. Perhaps, in our race to stay ahead of the machines, it can be tempting to try to make ourselves more and more like them. \u2013 \u00a92026 The New York Times Company<\/p>\n