emWave® Personal Stress Reliever® from HeartMath How emWave Reduces Stress and Creates Coherence Quote:
Here's why it works. emWave shows the effects of stress on your body by measuring the subtle changes in your heart rhythms. This type of measurement is known as heart rate variability analysis or HRV. The analysis of HRV is recognized as a powerful, non-invasive measure that reflects heart-brain interactions and autonomic nervous system dynamics, which are particularly sensitive to changes in emotional state.
However, emWave does a lot more than just show the effects of stress on your body. It reduces stress by training you to create more “coherence.” Coherence is a term used by scientists to describe a highly efficient physiological state in which the nervous system, cardiovascular, hormonal and immune systems are working efficiently and harmoniously. Coherence is a state very similar to what athletes experience when they are in what is called “The Zone”.
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again tempted to check this one out - I got a reduced price alert from amazon.com about it, although I did buy this one:
Stress Relief Stress Anxiety - StressEraser -
Have had it just a couple days.
Quote:
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Here’s where the magic happens: once you start making smooth waves, you activate something called the parasympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system. That’s quite a mouthful, but there is a simpler name — it’s also known as the "relaxation response." By prompting you to synchronize your breathing with your nervous system, the StressEraser helps you learn to relax your mind and body. And the good news is that it does what you’d think — it helps your body relax by releasing calming hormones and relaxing your arteries. It’s your body's natural, built-in repair system.
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It is wild that by just reading my pulse from my finger this unit can guide me into timing my breath to increase relaxing or balancing of the para/auto nervous system. I guess the heart rate changes in response to your breath, such that the heart rate increases just a bit when you inhale and the rate decreases when you exhale, perhaps. I found I was able to get the waves on the unit to stabilize out and I was getting very calm and breathing slow and deep without effort. Also it seemed like the inhale was faster during the beginning of the inhale and slows down at the top of my breath. And vice versa with the exhale. The exhale slows down as it gets toward the end, when the breath is about to turn around.
I'm not sure what is really different between the StressEraser and the emWave unit. Although the emWave has a way to click the pulse sensor on your ear. I'm not sure what kind of audio feedback the emWave makes, but the StressEraser can make little tones, 3 of them to let you close your eyes and still get the feedback. I like the graph the StressEraser shows, emWave seems to not have that. But the StressEraser tones are typical computer chip blips - couldn't they have made less intrusive sounds? I was using it before sleeping and the bleeps tell you when to exhale - ok, but the blips sometimes would disrupt my peace and if that sound could be like a gradual bell sound or flute sound it would be less jarring. But I don't think that's a big issue. I found a state of relaxation I haven't gotten to in a while, or that would take me longer and lots of mental quieting to get to. Having the StressEraser as something to focus on is part of what keeps the mind chatter down. I could also notice as soon as mind chatter got going, the coherence wave on the StressEraser would start to freak out.