Feeling calm isn’t just pleasant, it’s productive!
Ways to cultivate restorative moments in your day based on tracking my own heart rate data
Hello and welcome to the last weekly share of 2024!!! January’s longer post will be popping into your inboxes on January 1st. For today, I thought that talking about cultivating calm – specifically a list of high and low (think a financial investment vs. free) tools that I have found work for me – would be appropriate for this time of the year. As an Oura ring wearer, I find the metrics I am most interested these days are my temperature (such a useful tool to reveal if I am strained or my immune system is doubling down to ward off an illness), and then when and how I am achieving restorative time. The ring measures this based on your heart rate: moments where your heart rate lowers is defined as time that you are in a restored state. In contrast, working out, a sauna session, an interview, a conversation, a task might put you in a stressed state, where your heart rate is higher. My goal is to cultivate restorative time daily to balance out the large amount of “stress” in my day to day (I use air quotes because while it is considered stress, its source is not psychological but physical, and mostly due to having an active profession). With this pursuit, I’ve been noting what has been effective at lowering my heart rate to that restorative state, and it’s been really interesting to see what evokes these moments of calm for myself. My perspective on this has shifted quite a lot over the years, and I now look at these micro moments of calm as the plug-in moments required for me to participate in all the things I love that bring me joy AND may cultivate stress (also known as eustress, or positive stress). These little moments of calm are what allow me to do my sprints, to teach my double classes, to lift heavy weights, to walk to Main Street and back, and to show up in my relationships. Tres, tres importante!
So – let’s dive in!