Several years ago I started hearing about Heart Rate Variability. It’s basically a measurement of the variation in the amount of time between each heart beat. Apparently, it is a good indicator of overall physiological stress.
I won’t go into all the details here, but when I first looked into I heard about “HeartMath” a company that promotes this idea and has products around measuring and training your HRV to reduce stress. Their products seemed rather outrageously expensive to me for what they were.
I recently checked back into them to see if maybe the prices had come down. Sadly, the answer is no.
Previously I had tried to find an alternative solution and I found several apps that would take your HRV using the phone’s camera and flash. Kinda cool 🙂
These apps didn’t really do anything with ‘training’ your HRV to reduce your stress, it was just about measurement. I did ultimately buy a bluetooth heart monitor to up my HRV game, but it was annoying to put on each day and I really didn’t have a good app to actually affect my stress levels rather than just measure them.
In my latest round of research, I found a forum post that was informative on some other app options and explained a little better how the heartmath device works.
I looked into these and it appears that these are basically the same as the the heartmath device, but much cheaper:
I went with the HeartRate+ Coherence Pro because it was cheaper and that was recommended as the most similar to the HeartMath EmWave which is what seems to be the standard.