Biohacker Review of HeartMath ⭐⭐⭐ And what I learned from +300 HRV training sessions... by @jeroseland on 3Speak
▶️ Watch on 3Speak --- In this review, I'll honestly discuss the pros vs cons of the two HeartMath products, share how I saved nearly 50% on both mindfulness-enhancing devices, compare them to othe...
Tags: #health #review #biohacking
HeartMath Review, Interbalance Sensor versus MWave. Hey, I'm Jonathan with Limitless Mindset, and in this review, I'm going to talk about what I have learned from 300 HRV training sessions. I'm going to let you know everything that you need to know about these two devices. If you're thinking about... picking them up to take your mindfulness, your autonomic antifragility to the next level. This is the way to start a morning. About 7.30 a.m. I'm here, about 30 minutes after sunrise, here on the Black Sea Coast. I've just been doing a meditation session. Getting coherent. Once upon a time, I wrote an article entitled, the only biohacking device I'd buy, and it was about this bad boy, about the M wave, and my mind has actually changed on that. I'm going to explain why here, and you may have noticed that the inner balance sensor here is just dangling from my ear, and that is because it broke. And we're going to talk about that as well. You should, of course, research the science, look into the clinical trials when you are looking at products like these. So I'm going to have the links of where you can delve into that particular rabbit hole on PubMed over on limitlessmindset.com, which is linked below wherever you're watching me. And you're going to want to watch this review in completion, as I am going to tell you how I saved 50% on these devices. And you can, too. In fact, HeartMath may kick me out as an affiliate for sharing this with you. So, let's dive in. Let's talk about the difference between... these two, again, this is the inner balance sensor, and this is the M-wave. And so the major difference is that the inner balance sensor connects with an app. It connects with the inner balance app, which I have got here on my iPad. Hopefully it will connect in just a minute. And so this gives you biofeedback on the app of showing you whether you are in the green zone, the blue zone, or the red zone. And the green zone is the state of optimal coherence. That is what we are aiming for. And then, as you can see, and here, the M-wave over here does something similar, so it's telling me that right now I am a very coherent dude, which should come as a surprise to nobody. And it looks like the M-wave, the inner balance, you can see the report is giving me, it concurs. It's telling me that I am in the green and it looks like I'm dropping down into the blue and actually into the red now. And we can see over here, we can see that this one is giving me the same thing. So, hey, consistency, that's great as a citizen, scientist, experimenter. That's what I want. That's more of what I want from my products, is consistency. And so the cool thing about the inner balance is that it gives you this report. It gives you a whole lot more information. It tells you how much time you've been doing the session, and I am actually going to turn this off for the time being, so it doesn't make that annoying noise. I don't find the noise all that annoying while I'm doing my meditation with it, but for my video blogs, I'm a real stickler for not having a bunch of little beeping noises in the backgrounds of my video blogs. Isn't that right, babe? So you can see it gives this readout here where it tells me kind of what my coherence score is, like how deep... how zend out I really am at the moment. So it tells you what the score is here. And then it also tells you what your achievement points are for a given session, which is kind of cool. This is kind of like a gamification thing where you are ever striving to be a little bit more coherent, to be a little bit more in kind of that... cool, zen, relaxed, arousal, dare I say, spiritual sort of state while you are training. You might be wondering what the heck I'm doing. This is a tripart biohack to address my tinnitus, my ringing in my ears. Most conspicuously, I'm using my red light therapy device right here, blasting near-infrared light, blasting a low -level laser into my right ear, which you can see here. I'm using the blindfold, because I don't want quite that much light going right into my ear. And then this blinking thing on my chest here is my HRV meter, which gives me immediate... biofeedback on my state of coherence, and then at the same time, I'm doing meditation, listening to bineural... beats to try to reach an optimal state of mindfulness. When I got the inner balance and I logged into the app, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it still had my heart cloud data from way back in 2014 when I first tried the Mwave there in Medellín, Columbia. Hey, this is Jonathan Roseland, coming to you from MWA2 Land. Another real quick update on an interesting experience that I had recently with marijuana and the Mwave 2. So what I like about the M wave is that it's a subtly pleasant and mindful technology. The rising and falling bar on it is sort of mesmerizing, really. Unlike my smartphone, it's a zero distraction piece of technology. When I sit down to use it, I'm not getting sucked into the clickbait rabbit hole of Facebook or Twitter, minds.com, any of those social media apps that I have to resist clicking on when I sit down to use the inner balance. And also, because I get to put my smartphone aside when I'm using the MWave, I am not distracted by random dinging and vibrating app notifications. The interbalance, on the other hand here, literally, is an innovative self-monitoring heart rate variability training system for Android and iOS. biohackers who rigorously and perhaps obsessively self-quantify and experiment will want something like this, as it gives you the opportunity to run endless HRV tests to see how different things... like supplements that you're trying, or foods that you may have eaten, to see how these things affect your autonomic nervous system's well-being and your general capacity to respond dynamically to stressors, both internal and external. A couple of examples here. You can wear it while doing mundane things, like watching TV. reading, driving, working on your computer, etc. And you can kind of establish your baseline HRV that way. I would use it in the morning a lot. First thing in the morning, I would just plug it in and let it run for about 15 minutes and got a pretty good idea of what my baseline coherence is in the morning. And by the way, my baseline coherence increases dramatically after I've had my... coffee. Hey, this is the way to start the morning. As you can see, I'm out here on my patio, and it is a sunny day. It feels like almost hammock season already, and I'm doing my deep breathing with my M -wave device while enjoying just a bit of vitamin D. So if you are so fortunate as to have a little bit of sun in your life, I hope that you'll go do some deep diaphragmatic breathing. it'll make you feel just a bit more energized. So do HRV sessions first thing in the morning, and in the morning, and in the evening before bed, to kind of see how they... compare, you'll also want to measure your HRV while working on the computer and listening to focus-inducing music, something like Brain FF, Holo Sync style tunes. See how those affect your HRV while you're just kind of at rest, right? Versus go and listen to a podcast or a YouTube current events program and see how that might... You might not think that Alex Jones would be great for your heart rate variability scores, but mine are not bad, despite all the red pills coming hard and fast about the fluoride and the drinking water and the gay frogs. Those gay frogs, really, really concerning to me. And then you can measure how different meals and foods affect your HRV. Shout out to all my bachelors out there. Ordering your takeout food and thinking you're fancy, spending your 12 bucks on a meal. Look at this salmon. My wife just made me. Looks awesome, babe. Supplements, of course, this is a big deal, right? I have tried well over 100. neutropics, and when I get a new neutropic, I like to do, to take the dose of the neutropic, and then I'll give it about, I don't know, 30, 40 minutes to take effect, and then I'll lay down and do my meditation, do my heart rate variability training, and... Sometimes, neutropics will have an interesting effect on my HRV. By the way, you might be curious which neutropic has the most effect on my HRV, the most positive effect on my HRV. And I have tested this rigorously and repeatedly, and it is nicotine. That's right, nicotine is amazing for heart rate variability. And then you can also kind of get crazy, like me and Mrs. Roseland did, and you can even do an HRV session while making love. While I was doing my HRV training with the infrared light, Mrs. Roseland was doing something very naughty. She was stroking my toes. Oh, God, we shouldn't have let that secret out on the internet. Okay, now that it's out there on the internet, we should admit something very mysterious happened. We reached a coherent score of 3.14. Pye! What does that mean? What do you think it means, babe? Well, it means we're very good, because at some point we reached 5. No, 3.1, yes, but we also reached 3.14. Mm-hmm. The Euclidean number. Mm-hmm. Next point, and this is a positive of the HRV training, is that it helps you to habituate energetic, neutropic breathing. You guys might recall a while back I did this series of videos on how to breathe like a Jedi, where I was describing the different tantric breathing. techniques that make you more mindful, more energetic, more creative, more relaxed, etc. And this is something that the, this device makes you a bit better at habituating. And I'm telling you, you do have to experiment with this. When you need a pick-me-up in the mid-afternoon, maybe, I don't know, maybe you have pasta for lunch, and you find yourself kind of in those mid-afternoon doldrums, a 15-minute HRV session will energize and give you a very clear head. This is an experience that I had consistently with it. This is something that makes it kind of worthwhile. What I would do, at least before this thing broke, is that I would passively use the inner balance sensor while I was working on my computer here, and then I would keep an eye on my coherence score here on my iPad, as I was just kind of a, I would put the iPad. next to my computer screen, and then I would just have the HRV going on, and I would do this a lot of times. while I was doing my, I would do this during like a creative writing session, okay? And I want to keep my coherence score high during a creative writing session so that I'm kind of cognitively unencumbered, and I can come up with good creative stuff, right? And so I would be watching this thing. In fact, I'll reconnect it because it looks like the Bluetooth session I had going earlier. Stopped. it pooped out on me so I'll be doing a session of writing and then I'll be keeping an eye on this and then as I see my scores dip down as I see myself drop back down out of the blue zone or the green zone, then I'm going to do more of that deep, energetic, mindful breathing, and I'll get myself back more into this kind of energetic sort of creative state. Next, let's discuss the negatives. So, quote-unquote, mindfulness technology like this is nearly an oxymoron. Technology is, of course, in modernity, the main thing robbing us of mindfulness. You know, a while back, I tried to use a friend's, the muse headband device, and I found it... totally irritating to use. The thing couldn't, I couldn't quite align it right on my head, and the Bluetooth kept misconnecting on it with my smartphone, and the inner balance really suffers from some of the same issues. With something like this, I would much rather just plug the sensor into my smartphone instead of using Bluetooth. Fortunately, for the EMF avoidant, like myself, HeartMath now offers the inner balance wired, and it's similar to this, but it has no Bluetooth, you just plug it into your phone, and I think that is such a better... option as Bluetooth is just, it's not the most reliable of technology. I imagine Bluetooth as kind of being like, you got two Smurfs, okay, you got two Smurfs, their brother Smurfs, and they travel to, to opposite size of the Pacific Ocean. One is in Japan, and one is in California, okay? And you put these two smirfs in giant, giant, giant, powerful catapults, and then you launch these two smirfs at each other, right, over the Pacific. And so your goal here is to have these two smirfs flying through the stratosphere at tremendous velocities, and they're gonna... give each other a high five directly over Hawaii. And that's, to me, that's kind of the proposition of Bluetooth. And it just doesn't work, all that. Great, and I'm trying to have less EMFs in my life. So, yeah, if I were to buy one of these things again, I would definitely get the inner balance wired. And I, because I've noticed little issues with it. The Bluetooth doesn't work great, maybe 20% of the time. Let's talk about the Inner Balance app. So, the app, which, like I said, I've used it for over 300 sessions now, is not bad, but considering that it's a mindfulness app for a not inexpensive... device, there's a lot of room for improvement with it. So, first of all, I wish it had a bit more kind of like a, maybe a bit more of like an artistic kind of mode, or a hypnotic mandala kind of mode. You can... You can see it here, it's kind of boring, frankly. It just gives this expanding and contracting flower -looking thing on it. I mean, I'm thinking with all the amazing technology and graphics they have nowadays, couldn't they have done something where, like, you were exploring... a forest in, you could put on those VR goggles, or you could put on, like, the Google Cardboard goggles where you put your phone in front of your face, and do something where you're, like, exploring a forest, and you're breathing in and out meditatively, and then as you reach a higher state of coherence, it's going to get, like, lighter and lighter in the forest, like, the sun is rising, but then if you're down in the doldrums, then, I don't know, maybe the forest turns dark. and haunted or something like that. They could do all sorts of cool stuff like that with the technology, but instead we have just kind of boring interface. Another thing, I'm annoyed every time I use this app because it requires that I turn on location services. And I just say to myself, Why the hell does HeartMath want to know where I live? And who are they sharing that information with? So I have to deduct a full star from my review for this violation of their users' privacy. That's the sort of thing that we should have control over. They should not be, you know, imposing a demand of knowing what our GPS coordinates in this wild world are. I thought it would be cool if maybe it had a function where it would play like algorithmic music tracks, maybe kind of like... Brain FM that would rise or fall in intensity with the coherence that you reach. Like if you're, like as you're reaching a higher level of coherence, there'd be an algorithmic music and it'd become more like epic and grand of music. So you'd have this kind of a, you know, you'd have kind of an emotional, musical roller coaster that you'd be going on as you were HRV training. That would be really cool. I think that Muse does that. And I also noticed on it that the, this is another point of annoyance, that the chiming noises can be muted, because you might not want the chiming noises, but I also notice that if I mute the chiming, chiming, noises, it mutes my smartphone. And what I, what I enjoy doing, what I've settled on doing, is that I will listen to the Brain FM meditation tracks and they have really good... meditation tracks, I'll listen to those while I'm doing the HRV session, while I'm shining the red light on my skull. So I've got kind of like a tri -part biohacking mindfulness therapy thing going on. But if I mute the chiming, then it mutes the tracks themselves. I'd like to be able to have the option. The other thing that I... would do maybe to overcome this is I would have the, I would have this device connected with Bluetooth via to my iPad, and then I would have the Brain FM going through my smartphone. But as you can see, this is kind of a technology overload in the midst of mindfulness practice when their app should just have a robust set of features. Overall, it feels like the app for a $15, $20 product, as opposed to a $150, $160 product. It's just kind of underwhelming. Speaking of underwhelming, my main criticism of Hartmath's products has to be their underwhelming aesthetics. The Hartmath products, both of these that I've seen, they look and feel like things that you would buy from Walmart for about $15. Not things, not elite, devices for elite biohackers that cost well over... $100. And I did tell you that I saved 50%, I'm going to tell you how you can save 50% on these, which is that I bought both of them lightly used on eBay. I paid just $90 for the inner balance here. It retails for about 160. Although the inner balance wired, which I recommend higher, that one, I think, is retailing for $130 nowadays. So that's a better value. But I frankly think that this thing is overpriced at $160. Even at $140, $150, I think this thing is... overpriced. That's part of the reason why I went with eBay. Also, I live in a European country where it would be exceedingly inconvenient to take advantage of Heartmath's warranty in the event that it broke. So I decided to take a chance on a... used one when I first got it, it looked brand new, and it worked great for the three years up until, yeah, I've had it about three years now, and then the back plastic clip on it broke to my... dismay, I think I had about 280 sessions on it, a very gentle use, at which point it broke just randomly. So I have to deduct a star for that as well. Even if I had purchased it brand new from HeartMath, their warranty only covers the first year of use, so I'd still be screwed, even if I had paid full price from it. And I would kind of, if you're interested in the heart math stuff in this technology, like I said, there are some redeeming features to it. If you're interested in it, I do suggest just getting devices off of eBay, I was able to get both of the devices for $140. total, which is, that's a pretty good savings over what you'd pay for these things new. As I move towards my conclusion in this review, I want to talk about sunk cost -motivated self-improvement, as I've written about elsewhere. You're going to be a lot more disciplined in your personal growth endeavors if you spend money on them. That's the cold, hard truth. I pay for a gym membership because I know I'm actually going to go and work out because it's hitting me in the wallet. For the same reason, I purchased both of the heart math devices. For the longest time, I have known about all the myriad benefits of... meditation, but I was never quite as consistent with meditation as I knew I should be. So I dropped the cache on these two devices, which are meditation, mindfulness devices, and I really have gotten more consistent about that important practice since I got those devices. So in that sense, I feel that it was pretty good money spent on these things, even though I am ultimately the inner balance sensor that I use the most. That one gets two or three stars from me. There's a lot of shortcomings to it. There's a lot of room for improvement with it. I don't think it's the best value. But... from a perspective sunk cost motivation that it got me to get a bit more serious about my mindfulness practice, it's kind of worth it there. Perhaps I've dissuaded you from getting heart math products in this video. Hopefully I will persuade the HeartMath team to take the R&D a little bit more seriously, to take aesthetics a little bit more seriously, to take the programming of the app a little bit more seriously. But if you're not going to pick these up, I would suggest that you invest in your biohacking, in your personal…