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’s HRV coach to track and analyse employees’ data, and to share team-wide 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 4000.

Increasingly, it seems, white-collar workers who want to get ahead are obsessing over their HRV. Tim Ferriss, an influencer and the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, has said he first learned about HRV from a friend who “works with a lot of the best-performing investors in the finance world”. He added, “They all use HRV.”

Should they?

Fitness tracking enters the workplace

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.

In fact, greater heart rate variability – 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 – 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.

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.

(Heart arrhythmia, a potentially serious medical condition, can express itself in similar ways, but its changes in heart rate tend to be more erratic.)

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 got into measuring HRV through their interest in health and wellness.

Dr Scott Braunstein, the chief medical officer of Sollis Health, which provides a concierge service for urgent healthcare, said that HRV readings measured during sleep were most accurate and that factors like food intake or exercise influenced readings taken during the day.

For some white-collar workers, the sensitivity of HRV is precisely its allure.

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.

“We track workouts and races in order to analyse biometrics,” he said. “I realised I could do the same for my professional performances.”

He began to monitor his HRV before and after presentations, then experimented with ways to make sure it was relatively high going in and didn’t plummet while he spoke. “How much does my HRV drop during the presentation today versus a year ago, versus two years?” he said.

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 “reveal deeper truths and predictive guidance”.

Does improving HRV mean better health?

To help clients raise their HRV, some consultants train them to breathe at a slow, steady rate known as the “resonance frequency” 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.

A lawyer at a financial firm 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.

Other experts question whether it makes sense to focus directly on improving HRV, as opposed to emphasising overall health and resilience to stress.

“We could starve ourselves and our heart rate would be low, HRV would be high,” said Marco Altini, a data scientist who focuses on physiology. “But that would not be a good condition.” (Altini nonetheless agrees that breathing techniques can help reduce anxiety.)

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.

Jay Wiles, a performance psychologist who began his career working with military personnel and veterans, said his firm, Thrive, had 20 to 40 organisations as clients at a time. It charges anywhere from $15,000 (NZ$25,850) for a three-month “low-touch” engagement that consists of an initial training and periodic feedback to six-figure annual retainers for clients who want more hand-holding. Thrive has contracts like this with a large sports apparel company and a global consulting firm, each with tens of thousands of employees, he said.

Wiles said the improvement in their HRV data was reassuring to hardheaded rationalists who might not be receptive to other forms of therapy. “It goes from this ‘woo-woo’ talking about stuff to look at what’s happening within your nervous system,” he said.

Still, one doesn’t have to look far to find evidence of “woo-woo” in the HRV industrial complex, or at least over-exuberance. On a podcast put out by Whoop, the maker of the wristband, Wiles enthused, “There’s no possible way we can sell snake oil on heart-rate-variability biofeedback because there’s so much research to back it up.”

‘Fizziness’ in your body

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.

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 “biological athletes” who should strive to optimise their “cognitive self”, and she said regular breath work could make this happen more consistently.

“Maybe your peak you is from 8am to 2pm,” she said. “But then this gives you another two or three hours.”

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.

When we finished, my HRV had increased substantially, according to the numbers on the screen. “Most people notice the activity of their minds, the clarity – that’s usually the first sign of resonance,” she told me. “Another is that people say they feel a fizziness in their body.” I had to admit that I felt kind of fizzy.

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 – watches, rings, wristbands, continuous glucose monitors – 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.

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.

“I’ve watched people go insane from this,” she said.

For those who have anxiety – and, really, who among us doesn’t? – monitoring the watches and rings can become a compulsion.

“What this technology has done is it’s become an addiction for them, a kind of reassurance-seeking behaviour,” 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.

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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Noam Scheiber

Illustration by: Ben Voldman

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