how to accurately measure the aftermath of your breakup (science-based)

If you follow my stories here, you might be annoyed because topics coming in recently is about exes or breakups. Or you’re enjoying hacking these real-life challenges like me so you keep on reading.

Anyway! We know breakups are stressful, I actually think (maybe I’m exaggerating), it places second place on the list of most stressful events a human being could experience. At least on my list.

The first one is death of a loved one. That sense of loss creates a sense of intense emotional stress. And this could harm you in the long term if you don’t cope up.

In this story, you will remove all the guess work from assessing your stress levels based on feeling. How? I will share with you how to accurately measure the aftermath of your breakup, the science way!

What is Heart Rate Variability?

Everybody knows about heart rate. Different kinds of situations, movements either increases or decreases your heart rate. This is the reason why measuring heart rate is not reliable when you want to measure stress.

When you think of your heart beating 60 beats per minute (bpm), how do you imagine it? Do you think of your heart beating per second?

Like 1 beat distributed evenly per second.

Dug — 1sec — Dug — 1sec — Dug

Listen. That’s not what you want. This scenario suggests low heart variability. The heart rate doesn’t vary at all. Cutting-edge science determined that your ability to adapt to stress can be predicted by your HRV.

The higher your HRV, the better.

A little background story

Motivation of this story is to help myself out from adapting to the stressful situation I am currently facing (yes, breakup).

For the past weeks, I vowed to do everything in my power to turn away from smoking and drinking. Which was my go-to coping mechanism before.

That led me to study about willpower in the previous story, and how to hack it. So I’ve been keeping a food journal to log which causes me inflammation. Inflammation zaps out energy which I can then save and use for my willpower. One of the biggest discovery was moldy coffee and spinach.

And now, I did something stupid worsening my already stressful situation. My sleep became erratic (meaning I have a small window of recovery). And my emotions are all over the place. I feel my immune system deteriorating and destructive thoughts are coming in. “I got to do something about it.”

But the question is how do I hack this thing if I can’t measure it. I did my homework and came across heart rate variability. Which is a great predictor of how you are really doing.

What’s in it for you?

Okay. Now we know heart rate variability can tell us how we are really doing instead of saying “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.” Mind over matter doesn’t work all the time.

So how do we measure it?

#1 Know where you are first

First things first. You cannot improve on something you cannot measure.

You and I are lucky because we’re living in a world where technology is at its best. If you’re using Apple Watch, you can look at your heart rate variability via Health App. There are tons of apps, one is EliteHRV which is pretty popular.

Measure your HRV daily to know your baseline.

#2 Know when to recover or kick some ass

If your device says your HRV just dipped down from yesterday, that means you are still in the recovering stage.

This is the best time to pamper yourself, relax. Do yoga, breathing exercises, and some stretches. Pick any of your stress relievers (I’m not talking about inflammatory foods like sugar and beer, okay?)

This is not the right time to do high-intensity weight training, or 1 hour run. Rest.

Otherwise, if your HRV improved compared yesterday, go ahead and kick some ass today!

#3 Train your heart

Imagine being chased by a lion, being in fight-or-flight response is what you want to survive. This is when acute stress is useful.

Now, imagine work deadlines and your ex saying hurtful words to you. Your heart races, you’re overwhelmed at your heart, your hands and feet become cold. The same exact response to the lion. And your brain and heart doesn’t know the difference.

You can choose to turn off your sympathetic nervous system (the one in charge of stress response). And turn on your parasympathetic nervous system (the one in charge for recovery).

How do we do this? Breathing itself is a representation of this. Inhaling triggers your sympathetic nervous system. Exhaling, your parasympathetic nervous system. Key is to keep them balanced. Reason why when you’re stressed, your breaths become shorter.

As we are at the luckiest times, you can play around with tools teaching you how to turn off your stress response to unwanted triggers.

I currently use the HRV4Biofeedback which uses camera to give real time feedback. And my sleep rating went up last night by training for 4 sessions (3mins each). Which I’m very grateful for since I forgot how to sleep soundly for weeks now.

Popular ones are from HeartMath. You can check them out!

There you go! I hope this saves your sanity and well-being like it did to mine. Your relationship for sure has its amazing moments. But even amazing things has its end.

It’s time to pick yourself up from heartbreak. And do everything in your power to hack yourself out from this mind-heart-and-body-killing stress. Take this seriously because chronic stress leads to aging and degenerative diseases. You don’t want to bump to your ex years from now looking old, right?

Thanks for reading!