Howard Martin on Coherence (Interview Archive)
I start by reaching for a positive feeling. Appreciation for the good things in my life, say, or the affection I hold for someone or something I care about. Sometimes it's compassion for whatever the world happens to be struggling with at the moment. The longer I sit with feelings like those, the more my coherence level climbs. It goes up, and the shape of my heart rate variability shifts along with it. Once I'm in that zone, appreciating things comes more naturally. Caring comes more naturally, and so does a deeper sense of compassion. The technology, at bottom, is teaching us to drop into those positive psychological states that carry real physiological health benefits.
What ends up happening, Erik, is that we raise something we call our coherence baseline. We end up sitting at a naturally more coherent level. Living day to day, we move up and down and sideways. Every day comes with its emotions. Some we'd rather skip, and some we genuinely enjoy. But with a higher baseline in place, a stressful moment doesn't knock us as far off course. When disappointment shows up, or anger, or anxiety, it's easier to find our way back to a steadier place. Easier to get back to where we're regenerating ourselves and functioning at our best, being the kind of people we most want to be.
Erik: That's great. I understand HeartMath defines coherence in a specific way, and that it isn't the same thing as simply being relaxed. Is that fair?
Howard: Completely fair. Take relaxation through the lens of the autonomic nervous system. That system runs on two branches, the sympathetic, which basically accelerates things, and the parasympathetic, which eases them down. When you move into a relaxed state, and I want to be clear I have nothing against relaxation, it's a worthwhile thing to do, what you're after is getting the sympathetic to balance out or fall in step with the parasympathetic. Under stress we carry a load of sympathetic activity. Relaxation techniques pull in the parasympathetic to counter it.
Coherence works on a different principle. You take the parasympathetic and the sympathetic and you draw them together at the level of frequency. They synchronize. They reach a kind of one-pointedness, rather than one simply canceling out the other the way a seesaw tips back and forth. They meet, energetically, in a way that's genuinely harmonious.