Don't Judge Your Day Only From How It "Feels" - Why I Track My HRV Through Work

Yesterday, I mentioned that I had a few rough days in a row.

Today was pretty similar, and may be another week given the circumstances.

When you are going through a rough time, it often "feels" awful.

I know I definitely felt off through a good chunk of today.

I felt like I was out of it.

Time moved really slowly.

Things felt like at any moment something else could blow.

When the work ended, I felt relieved, but exhausted.

However, I also had an overarching "feeling" like the chaos of the day would lead to some really bad biorhythm results.

See, I track HRV throughout my day.

This is a measurement of health - tracking the time between each heartbeat.

When you're healthy, your HRV should overall be higher as your heart rate should naturally adjust to whatever is needed by your body.

But, typically when you are stressed out, your HRV will decrease overall - your heart has a difficult time adjusting to whatever is happening.

I was positive that my HRV would be horribly low today.

That isn't what I found though.

When I looked at the data today, I found that in fact I had the best HRV scores of the week!

Why is that?

Well, looking through the data, there appears to be one reason this occurred.

I went through a LOT of Flow States today.

See, when you go into Flow States, your HRV should naturally rise as your body goes into "Peak Performance" mode.

You can think of it kind of like a racecar.

Driving a racecar through the city "works", but you aren't getting the full usage out of it.

However, put the racecar on the track, and that is what it was designed for.

Flow States are our body's equivalent to racecars on the racetrack.

A bunch of neurochemicals are all released at the same time during Flow States, which allow your body to excel and generally perform better.

This is what was happening to me.

The reason that I was so exhausted at the end of the day was that Flow States require HUGE amounts of energy - the more often you get into them, the more energy is required.

Looking at my data, no wonder I was exhausted!

There was a ton of Flow happening!

This can also explain why time "felt" slow - in Flow States, our sense of time becomes distorted because the part of the brain that tracks that literally shuts off.

The Flow States can also explain "feeling out of it".

Again, certain parts of the brain shut down during Flow States, and when they come back online it can feel disjointed.

Not to mention that with the amount of energy I must have gone through, there simply was less energy to "startup" those processes quickly again.

Thus, it would feel lethargic as it mustered whatever fumes were remaining to reignite those systems.

However, this isn't what I found MOST interesting about this data.

What really stood out was that I actually had the capacity today to enter the Flow State for that total amount of time!

From about 10:30 am to 7:30 pm I was mostly in Flow States, not the ENTIRE time mind you, but it looks like about 80% of the time.

That's an estimated 4-6 Deep Flow States, with what appears to be some minor Flow States mixed in there.

How is this possible?

Proper Recovery - Sleep, Nutrition, Stress Recovery - Things I always make sure to take care of.

Without the proper recovery, a day like this isn't possible.

One thing to keep in mind - I didn't "feel" great throughout the day, I actually thought my results would be really bad!

But they were actually great - how we "feel" isn't always a perfect system to understand how our days "really" went.

Since I track my data, and understand how to read it, I can tell that today was actually an AMAZING day, even though it didn't "feel" that way.

Understanding how you feel is important, but also track so you understand deeper truths, and so that you can plan accordingly.

For me, I need some more deep recovery for this weekend.

I need to refill my energy stores to ensure I can continue hitting the ground hard!