Aware of your heartbeat? If yes, study says YOU can trust your gut!
Copyright by Vanhookc
Trust your gut, says Nat Geo, if you are aware of your heartbeat. Yes, you read that right.
People who are aware of their heart beats do better when making “gut” assessments, say scientists from the University of Cambridge.
It makes sense, if you think about it. Your subconscious brain may be picking up on danger signs that you are not consciously aware of, which cause your body to react. If you are good at catching an escalating heart beat, you are picking up on a subconscious clue from your body.
I can tell you without a doubt, I am very aware of my heart rate and when it climbs, so this makes sense to me. The simplest things can set mine off–simply watching a video of someone sending subtle threatening red flags to others (where I am in no danger) sends mine racing!
Read more here.
I am very aware of my heart beat, when my pulse increases. I have to really get quiet and away to myself to be aware of a slower heart rate. I think our minds guard against us feeling it all of the time. We would go crazy to be aware of it constantly. I don’t think I could do the card test, however.
What is the card test?
Fascinating research! I wonder whether that’s one reason some people meditate on the heart area. I’m quite aware of my heartbeat, but I have not used that knowledge except sometimes to regulate my emotions.
I think Karon was referring to the card game used in the study:
“University of Cambridge researcher Barnaby Dunn and colleagues had 28 subjects play a virtual card game in which they could win money by choosing cards from four supposedly random decks. The game involved guessing whether a chosen card would be the same color as an already upturned card.”
Hello! Thanks, missed the connection LOL 😉
I don’t think I am aware of my heartbeat. I am aware of “stress.” Things that make me feel “eww” or “feel stressed” or “uncomfortable.” THAT gets my attention. I don’t like watching people get into trouble or watching people do things that are so foolish that they will inevitably reap severe consequences or cause harm to another person or animal. But, again, I don’t think I am aware of my heartbeat. Interesting that you two are aware of yours.
I think I am hyper aware. Just watching a video online will set mine off if I see certain behaviors.
I would say that I’m not consciously aware of my heartbeat in general. I’ve never paid attention to whether I’m aware of changes in my heartbeat or not. I honestly have no idea. I do know that I become consciously aware of it sometimes several times per day, but I don’t think I’ve ever associated it with behaviors happening around me.
One thing that I do seem to be hyper-aware of though is friction in a room. I can usually feel any friction between people in a room within seconds of walking in even without having an awareness of anything happening. I’m almost extremely sensitive to friction– it usually causes me physical discomfort or at times, some kind of indescribable physical pain being in the presence of someone who is actively upset with someone else. It’s not my heartbeat that I’m feeling though I don’t think– it’s more of an electricity buzzing through the air and pressing against my skin that seems to emanate from whoever is upset. It’s like being squeezed by the emotional pressure someone else is pumping into the room.
My instinct is to get away, but that’s not usually reasonable because it’s usually just a normal, “socially acceptable” upset, and it’s most often either a family member at home or coworker(s) when I’m at work, so I’ve adapted to just keeping my head down and engaging in significant conflict avoidance until I can find a way to either mitigate it or get rid of it by leaving or the upset person leaving or cooling down.
I suspect this sensitivity is what causes me to always try to make peace between people and lighten moods and ease tensions before it devolves into that kind of friction. It’s like I have a choice between either doing that or being stuck enduring the discomfort, and for me that’s no choice at all because it quickly becomes too much to bear. It’s like a kind of shell shock that I’m compelled to avoid.
Do you have that too?
I sense tension or friction quickly too, but I sense my heart race immediately. I am not always aware of my heart beat, but I am a lot of the times. I do conflict avoidance or try to soften a situation if I can too.
>I sense my heart race immediately…
Similar to the question I asked Keith – is there more to your heart racing than just the awareness of tension or friction? You might also want to pay attention to respiration, too, in those situations. Does your heart race differently in different situations? If so, are there consistent patterns to the way your heart races in different situations, and does that give your mind more info about each type of situation? Is your body signaling more to you than just the fact there is tension or friction?
>it usually causes me physical discomfort or at times, some kind of indescribable physical pain being in the presence of someone who is actively upset with someone else.
I don’t have that type of experience, so I have a question for you that I think you’ll enjoy a lot – is there a pattern to the types of pain you feel? In other words, is the pain similar if the tension is a family issue (kids mad at parents or vice versa), and is there a different pain if it’s a romantic couple having a spat and a different pain again if it’s friends arguing… you get the idea. My hunch is that your body doesn’t just sense tension, but it’s also sending signals *about* the tension, and those signals are consistent from one situation to the next.
The testable hypothesis is this: does one type of discomfort mean one thing is happening, and that a second type of discomfort means that is a second thing happening, and so on throughout all the types of pain you feel, and your body sends this type of signal to you consistently. In other words, I believe the signal is clear and consistent, the interpretation of the signal might need some practice because the differences might not be that big 🙂
Beyond just the fact there is tension in a room, is your body signaling more to you, so you have a better sense how to proceed with peace making based on the characteristics of pain in each type of situation?
Your thoughts?
I’ll have to start paying more attention to that because it’s not something I’ve done in the past. In general, once I sense the tension, I don’t typically look at it any deeper because I have all the information I need to make my choices and avoid trouble.
As for whether there’s a pattern to it, that’s a very difficult question to answer, because I haven’t even been able to describe the sensations I feel other than that sort of “electrical buzzing” through the air and pressing against me, and even that description leaves a lot to be desired. I will say that the closer I get to the person, the “thicker” it feels which is kind of how I can sense the direction it’s coming from.
There are subtle variations for me, I think, depending on the situation, but I’m not sure that those signals are from “out there”, I think they may be more to do with me. For example, I think the sensations I get when I’m dealing with a family situation are a little different because they’re colored by my experience over the years with my family members. With people I’m not related to, I don’t know that I’ve had very different sensations with them, but again, I’ll have to start paying a lot more attention to it to really be able to answer your question.
When I do sense that tension in a room, and it’s a room full of strangers, I’ll pay some attention to what I’m seeing in terms of keeping an eye on the situation to make sure it isn’t going to escalate badly, and as far as how I do that, I’ll pay attention to the key players and try to suss out what the dynamics are between them so I can better plan what to do. For example, what’s the personality of the people involved? Which party is the more likely one to have caused the issue? Which party is more likely to escalate the situation? In what way will that person likely escalate it? How is the other party likely to respond to that? Are there others in their group who will likely intervene, and if so, is it likely to be effective, or just make the situation worse? Things like that.
I also look for possible ways that I can help whichever person is likely the victim of the situation if I think there’s some way to do that without drawing attention to the fact that I’m doing so, making myself a target (usually), or making things worse for someone.
The usually part in parenthesis above is because I can think of at least one time where I intervened knowing that I’d become the target because that was the best way available to me to be able to de-escalate the situation. It was a domestic dispute in a parking lot where a guy was being extremely verbally abusive and escalating an argument with his girlfriend– it was likely to become physical within the next few minutes, so I drew his attention and anger to myself in order to get it off from her and de-escalate that situation, because it wasn’t likely that he’d be able to escalate very far with me. I said something to him that would be taken as an affront to himself and emasculate him in front of his girlfriend, his friend, and another young lady (the other guy’s girlfriend perhaps). The only way for him to deal with that would be to attack me to regain his perceived status among his peers, and we were getting in our car to leave and they were nowhere near a car, so they couldn’t easily follow us. He attacked me verbally and then punched me as we drove past. The most likely outcome there is that my actions would’ve focused his rage at someone other than his girlfriend and escalate it toward that person, which would reduce his rage against his girlfriend and probably allow that argument to come to an end without violence.
I had the added satisfaction of seeing the other young lady laugh at what I told him because it made it abundantly clear how ridiculous and childish he was being, and planting that seed always makes it more likely that she’ll eventually talk some sense into her friend and try to talk her into getting away from the guy. That wasn’t something I’d planned on, but it was definitely icing on the cake. 🙂
Hey Keith 🙂
Very interesting stuff you posted – thanks! The sensations may be enough to tell you what you need to know to avoid trouble – and no more. It seems like your intuition and perceptions are really good, and they can pick it up from there. It will be interesting to see if the sensations are different – I don’t know if they are, but my guess is there are differences with lots of value to you.
In other words, you’d be great as a human radar – just put you into a room, and ask what’s happening 🙂 However, I do frown on people getting punched, so hopefully that doesn’t happen too often to you, though it’s clear how that helped de-escalate the situation you described.
Thanks again for very interesting info!
Huh, I thought everybody could feel it.
The idea of listening to my heartbeat doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface 🙂 It’s not just heartbeat – the entire body can not lie. So as one example, I’ve learned that virtually every type of pain I feel means I’m *doing* something wrong, my body is sending me a signal to change whatever that is. Taking medicine does not change what I’m doing, and does not get to the root of the problem – what is actually causing the pain.
If I’m tired, that’s my body sending me a signal. If I have a lot of energy, that’s also a signal (that I interpret as I’m doing most everything right). If my heartbeat goes up or down, that’s my body sending me a signal. If I get gas that means I ate something wrong. If I wake up refreshed that means I took care of what needed to be taken care of so I got a good night’s sleep. And on, and on, and on.
This is very basic to who we are as a species. I very strongly believe this is an evolved trait everyone has, and I’m sure virtually all animals do this all the time. We are now so “intelligent” that we focus on many other signals, and nearly everyone isn’t even aware of all the signals their body is sending. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can do better – a lot better – in understanding the signals your body is sending you. The body values survival, pleasure, and so forth, and does not value pain, stress and similar/related emotions and consequences. The signals the body sends have those kinds of values. This is evolution at its very best (IMHO).
The body always tells the truth. Always. It can not lie. My mind can totally mess this up, my feelings can get in the way, and so forth, but *every* signal my body sends is the truth, and that’s very important to pay attention to if I want to live the best possible life and have the best understanding of those around me. Learning to listen for – and then correctly interpret – the signals is still more art than science, but we all have our own virtually flawless truth detector – our entire body. Just pay attention, it’s amazing what you’ll learn about yourself and others from the multitude of signals your body is sending you all the time, including right now 🙂
Eyes: In the article that we were reading, it was said that people who could sense their heartbeat were more likely to avoid a stacked deck, If they were presented with a series of good decks and stacked decks. They wouldn’t be aware of the deck being stacked, but in the experiment, they would start to avoid a stacked deck. I hope I explained this experiment so that it was understandable.
I’m really aware of my heartbeat, but I’m sure it’s because I’ve had issues with irregular heartbeats in the past. I can tell when my heart skips half a beat, which is actually quite normal (as in a lot of people have this happen once a day or more). However most people aren’t aware of it unless they happen to be looking at an EKG machine when it happens (at least that’s the experience I read about one person who built his EKG machine).
I could be wrong, but more people seem to be aware of a change in their heartbeat if it’s triggered by a situation, but not so much if it’s caused by food. Perhaps it’s because usually there is a more sudden and substantial change in response to a tense situation, but there are definitely some types of food that increase my heart rate around 5%-10%. I’m certain I would not have become aware of it without my previous heart problems.