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Howard Martin with Dawson Church

Positive Emotions as a High-‐performance Technique

Dawson: My guest today is Howard Martin who is also a long-‐time friend. A few moments before we began the call he said, “Let’s be in the heart together,” so I’d like to invite all of you to be there with us. More than his external bio, which is impressive, he has that ability to bring us into that space.

To cover those external basics for him as well, he helped Doc Lew Childre found the Institute of HeartMath, which has been incredibly influential in bringing stress reduction and centering to literally millions of people. With Doc Childre, he coauthored the book, The HeartMath Solution.

Since its inception, he has been one of the leaders bringing this remarkable, practical technology to many different realms of endeavor, especially business. He has helped develop executive training programs. He has helped executive teams with learning skills and in bringing these practical abilities to their work lives.

You’ll get a sense as we talk together today about just how incredibly transformative these things are. Let’s all just be in that heart space together. Welcome, Howard.

Howard: Dawson, here we are 23 years later on this interview together. We’ve been friends for a long time. The listeners may want to know that when we first started HeartMath, we were basically a tiny little group of people with a vision about a heart-‐connected world and what we could do to help create it. We had a building here in Boulder Creek, California, where I’m actually sitting today. You were in the publishing business at that time and had your publishing company here. We had office space for you here and that’s how we met. That was a long time ago. Certainly you and I have gone through all of our changes, hopefully evolutionary in nature, as has the world. It brings us to this moment in time right now with you and with everyone listening around the world to talk about the things that are most meaningful to us.

Dawson: The irony is that back then, 20 years ago, the kinds of approaches we were championing were thought to be non-‐mainstream, alternative, and fringe. Next week, for example, I’ll be training mental health professionals at Fort Hood, Texas, right in the center of the big military base.

HeartMath is now used at the Naval Academy. In all these ways, there are things that we were pioneering all those years ago that seemed so exotic at the time. For example, calming yourself when you were in a state could produce powerful shifts in the way you function in the outside world. Those ideas seemed foreign back then, but now they’re part of almost every field of human endeavor. People


who are using them successfully perform so much better than those who are still struggling without those tools. It’s remarkable that things we were aware of back then have now become so ingrained into mainstream life.

Howard: Yes, and the best is yet to come. The momentum of change and the adoption of new thoughts and new ideas is part of the evolutionary imperative of our times. You’re right that years ago we were pioneering in nature. I think both of us were coming from our own inner experiences, looking for ways in which we could externalize those things.

It’s been said many times that HeartMath was way ahead of its time, but over time we’ve become more and more accepted and more appropriate. As you mentioned, we work a lot in very mainstream organizations now, teaching people about things like coherence and about the power and importance of the intelligence of the heart. It’s not just in a spiritual or philosophical way, but also in ways that make life better. They are ways that make us better in business and in relationships, that improve our health, and certainly help to contribute to creating a more heart-‐based world, which is, I believe, what all of us, at our cores, really want.

Dawson: For those of our listeners who don’t know what heart coherence is or what HeartMath is, give us the elevator speech.

Howard: HeartMath is a system of tools, techniques, and methods designed to empower people through these changing times, all underpinned with scientifically validated research.

Our methods or systems that I mentioned are something people can learn and do. We have the organizations, the body, and the name. We have a for-‐profit and a nonprofit. We’re still based where we originally formed ourselves in Northern California in a little town outside of Santa Cruz in a beautiful mountain area, but we’re global in nature. We’ve grown to be a big little organization many ways.

It’s a heart-‐based system. It’s a system designed to put people in touch with something we already have. It’s this magnificent power that can and does lift us beyond our problems, especially in the midst of chaos and confusion.

Of course, heart has been talked about for thousands of years, but it has remained mostly in the confines of spirituality and philosophy. It’s often looked at as sentimental, sweet, or overly emotional.

Certainly, heart is much bigger than us. We’ve just done our part, but what we’ve been able to do at HeartMath is we took what we felt inside and began to do rigorous scientific research to look at things and to confirm or disprove certain things we believed. From that research, we created a really interesting story about heart. We characterized heart in a different way, which has now been accepted all around the world: the understanding that heart, at the physiological level, is more than a blood pump. It’s an information-‐processing center in our bodies. It is sending powerful commands to the brain and throughout the entire system, and our overall well-‐being and our ability to function, to be fulfilled, and to be productive relies upon heart and the intelligence of the heart.

We did that and we embodied that in training programs. We certified trainers and coaches. We have things for health professionals and we have our technology products. All of these things are ways in which we externalized all of this so we could have a system that people could do something with and share.

Understanding heart and having the philosophical tenets is, of course, important, but what really matters is when we get it into daily life. What we’ve always tried to do is to translate these things into something that is practical and usable.


Dawson: I so like that about your system. It is so practical and easy to use. I’m also struck by the way you pioneered using scientific methods to validate your techniques. That was such an important step. What happened when that process began was that the findings were so remarkable and powerful that they really made the medical and psychological world sit up and take notice.

Earlier on, 23 years ago and sitting in that office, we intuitively thought of these things as being good for people. When they began to get tested scientifically and we began to get quantitative and qualitative data about the changes they make in our bodies, it was really powerful.

One of your earlier studies tested this marker called salivary immunoglobulin A, which is a very vital component of our mucous membranes. You found that just five minutes of your Quick Coherence Technique in the morning resulted in a spike in that immune factor in mucus membranes. The effect of that five-‐minute spike in the morning lasted seven hours. That was an astonishing study.

Howard: Yes, it was. It was interesting because we were doing a comparative study. We compared it against feeling a negative emotion.

We asked the participants in the study to experience five minutes of anger. We also saw a spike in the immune system component, but what happened an hour later is that it dropped to 100% below baseline and it didn’t recovered for seven hours.

We brought the same group back a week later. We asked them to experience five minutes of care instead. What we saw was a spike and it was bigger than the spike we saw with anger. An hour later the baseline returned to exactly where it started, yet it then began to climb and continued to increase and climb over seven hours.

We posed the question, and the results were obvious. What do we do to our bodies when we experience anger and what do we do to our bodies when we experience care? How much in the course of a day, week, or month do we experience strong, negative emotions like anger, frustration, irritation, and those kinds of things versus emotions like love and care? What is the result of that on our health?

That was just one of many studies. When we started HeartMath, we had had our own experience of heart. Doc Childre, me, and the other founders had been 15 years working in obscurity before we ever formed HeartMath, and we had plenty of experiences. When we decided to take the conscious step of forming an organization and to begin to try to disseminate what we’d learned, we recognized that if we were going to put a heart-‐based system into the world now, in these times, it had to be done a bit differently. We needed to build that bridge between what people intuitively feel inside and what can be shown to be empirical. That bridge, of course, was science.

The science was never intended to take the heart out of heart. It was never trying to marginalize heart and put it down to psychological or physiological equations and understandings, but it did give it that solidness that it needed for people to accept it. The study you mentioned was just one of many in this huge body of research today.

One of the things you said a minute ago is something that others have said about us that I find interesting. We have introduced a new view of physiology and psychology simultaneously.

Dawson: Psychology is physiology and physiology is psychology. When you shift one, you shift the other.

One of my favorite demonstrations in my live workshops is that I hook people up to one of your monitors and we get them into a relaxed, heart-‐coherent state. Then I say, “Think a negative thought.” They think one negative thought and suddenly the whole control panel changes and you see it showing


up in their rhythm. That mental construct of just one negative thought, accompanied usually by a flood of negative emotion, is then having an immediate powerful effect on their physiology. The old mind-‐body split where we saw our mind in one bucket and our body in another is really dated and is not at all the way we work.

There’s a dynamic interchange happening all of the time between mind and body and body and mind. Shifting one of those points of entry intentionally then has a powerful effect on the whole. I love the technology you guys have created that dramatizes this and makes it so visual to clients so they understand, “If I have a negative feeling or thought, it is really affecting my body.”

Howard: That’s true. The technology we developed was really more out of our scientific research. We wanted to give something that people could use, a technology that could be beneficial to people and something most everybody could have so they could look at the changes occurring in their body as they practiced various techniques or as they observed their emotional states.

That’s what the emWave and now the mobile version, the Inner Balance Trainer, have done. As you know, Dawson, they were big steps for us too in the evolution of HeartMath.

You mentioned you were going to Fort Hood. First of all, I want to applaud you for going there and doing what you can to help those people. When you said that, I remembered that one of the very first seminars I did was way back in the early 1990s and I was sent to Fort Hood to train military personnel.

As I remember, back then we did not have the technology. We barely had any science, and I was talking about heart using posters that I carried with me. I remember that the people really liked it and that the training went well. It was because there was something innate within us all that the program resonated with and they got it.

That goes back a long way to Fort Hood, and I hope you have a very successful program when you go there next week to assist those people with an ongoing condition that seems to exist there.

Dawson: It’s interesting where progress is made and where progress is not made because, in many ways, much of the psychiatric establishment in the military is actually quite resistant to any kind of behavioral non-‐pharmacological solutions to things like PTSD. Yet there are areas of practice in which practitioners, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and psychotherapists are enthusiastically embracing these techniques.

We’re in the middle of a paradigm shift in society. There are some places that are embracing and using what we’re talking about here. Other places still only look for external solutions like drugs and pills. We’re in this odd transition state now where we haven’t quite broadly made the leap to recognizing how powerful this is, even though the pioneers are adopting these methods. We’re in that betwixt and between state where it’s really frustrating. We wish this were available to everyone who needs it. There are still many people who have no been reached by these techniques, so the more we can get it out there, the better.

Howard: You described it very well. We are in over 50 military hospitals and VA centers. It is the individual psychologists, therapists, counselors, and doctors that have adopted HeartMath and use our technology with these people, but it is changing.

About two weeks ago, we finalized a contract with the Army Wellness Center where we will be training over 100 mentors integrating HeartMath into their programs there. What that means is that it is now being adopted at a larger level. It’s more of an institutional adoption than an individual who has inspired adoption within the military work. That’s just one small part of what you do and what we do.


Dawson: That is so encouraging. Now that you have tools like the emWave and the Inner Balance Trainer, both the pocket version and the laptop or desktop version, there is the visual for these tools and it makes it easy to show people the value of doing this.

Howard, I’m just curious. You’ve hit these milestones. You’re bringing this to a larger audience and you’re in that place where your methods are being adopted more widely and the science is behind you. It isn’t just one or two studies now. There’s a whole raft of them. Where do you see moving this technology next?

Howard: That’s a good question, Dawson. I think there are two sides to that answer. I go through this all of the time. I’m in the middle of these things as we’re involved in our call today.

For HeartMath, we’ve got a big little organization. We’ve taken on so much over these years and we’re in so many different areas of society. You could call them markets. We address so many different things that for us now it becomes a matter of more focus.

Also, how do we take this huge body of work that we’ve done and actually utilize it better through partnerships, licensing, and things like that? We’re involved in all kinds of really interesting things.

There are licensing deals on our technology, algorithms, and all this with major players and, certainly, partnerships with other organizations, but how do we do that better? How do we focus more so that our work can have more impact?

On the other side of that, I go back to the beginning for me. What this has always been about is me following two basic principles that I adopted as a very young man. One was that I believed that life was about continuous growth. That was the purpose of life. To me, that was what everything seemed to be doing whether it was conscious of it or not. It was growing, changing, adapting, and trying to improve. That’s what my life had to be about.

The second principle was that life had to be about service to others and that, whatever you gained, you had to find a way to give it to someone else. It didn’t have to be in a grandiose way. It didn’t have to be through an organization, being an author, a speaker, or any of those kinds of things, but you had to be giving and be of service.

I’ve still maintained the connection to those two principles over all these years. Yes, there’s business to be done. There’s focus, science, algorithms, and all of that, but for me it’s about teaching people to love, learning more about love, how to give love and receive love. I know that can sound soft and squishy, but to me it is not. To me it is high performance. It is a way of life that engages life in a way that allows us to experience it uniquely and to contribute to it uniquely.

For me it goes back to heart, even in the midst of all this sophistication. Certainly, you know that my role has changed from being a young Southern boy that showed up here in California with wide eyes and a vision to a speaker, author, and businessman today. I still think it’s about heart, care, and the power of love.

Where does this go? It’s getting more practical in how we approach these things so that it can have more impact. I believe that if we were to stop everything right now and never do anything else, HeartMath would live on. It’s already built into society in a way. The legacy is already in place in some ways.


To me, the adventure is still unfolding. There are many more chapters to write in the book of HeartMath. We are unfolding and moving in new directions. I think creating more of a global society that functions from the principles and characteristics of heart is the goal.

It’s doing our part to usher in a new dimension of consciousness and intelligence that reshapes the psychological paradigms by which we live and the values associated with life and the institutions, actions, and reactions that accompany those things. That’s the real mission and goal for me. That never ends.

We’re just doing more of the same things we’ve been doing, but trying to be better at them and more focused so that we’re not spread all over the place. We’re trying to maintain that core connection to what’s really most important to us individually and collectively here at HeartMath. That thread is always there and it’s never lost in the process of getting bigger, growth, or things like that.

Dawson: One of the things you talked about is partnership. What has struck me about many of the new business models is that we succeed not by competing. We succeed by collaborating.

The organizations that are the most impactful and able to spread their ideas most widely are not those that are the most vicious competitors in the old sort of dog-‐eat-‐dog Darwinian sense or survival of the fittest. They’re the organizations and people that are the best at collaborating and harnessing the power of shared teams to move their vision forward.

Howard: It’s difficult for any one organization to do it now. The world is just too big, but the cooperation can be there. You’re right that part of the shift in consciousness is taking away some of the ambition and competition and putting people into a more desirable state of what they sometimes call “coopetition.”

It’s organizations working together even if they have differences in order to achieve the desired outcomes that the organizations want. That takes work and maturity. It takes being self-‐secure and being able to see into the world of others to exhibit the kind of care that makes the heart connection that allows for ideas and ways of working together to emerge.

You and I are both members of organizations that desire to do this. We see how that works. We see that it goes well in many cases and that there are always challenges as well.

I think the heart’s desire to join rather than separate is part of an evolutionary change that’s occurring. It’s always been there, but it’s coming more to the forefront now. People want connection. What is social media about if it’s not about that? It’s about people wanting to find out about others and to connect in some way.

At HeartMath, we can only get so big. We’re not trying to be the next IBM or some gigantic organization. It wouldn’t fit the culture. The way we need to expand is through more meaningful cooperation.

Dawson: When you have that lens of how to amplify the good experience and the love that is our mission, it is a framework through which you then approach your business and life decisions and your choices about partnerships. When you have that cognitive frame in place, that then gives you a set of lenses through which to approach those kinds of possibilities of partnership.

Howard: That’s true. I know many people listening are experiencing the speed-‐up in life. We’re all in this together. You and I talked about that some as well. It’s a time period of extraordinary change. It’s difficult sometimes to find that compass you talked about. We need to have the right lenses in place so that we can begin to discriminate in ways that are going to be more refined and produce more of the results we want in our lives personally and professionally.


At the same time, Dawson, what I’m finding even in myself is a need for more flexibility. Things can change very quickly. I have to be able to adapt to those changes and be open to new suggestions and new ideas.

The maturity gained from many years of work is good because it provides that foundation, but I find that a delicate balance between relying upon what I know and the maturity that I’ve accumulated over the years and keeping that openheartedness and excited, childlike adventurous spirit allows new things to come to me.

Dawson: Just picture for a moment someone listening to our discussion who perhaps has lost that and is sitting at work in an office doing a job that has no meaning for her or him. A study done by the Gallup organization recently found that over half of the workers interviewed were not fully engaged with their jobs or were actively disengaged from their jobs.

There’s a term “presenteeism.” It refers to when people are physically sitting at their desks, but their heads or hearts aren’t there. Just picture that person for a moment listening to this interview. What would you give them as a starting point to try to rediscover that childlike sense of play you’re talking about in life and work?

Howard: Let me first say that you’re describing a lot of people in today’s world, and I have compassion for that. I want to state that right upfront because those situations are not easy. Many people are in jobs that are not fulfilling to them because they have to be there for economic reasons. That’s a common experience. I have compassion for that.

I know this sounds simple and it’s been said a lot before, but I’m going to restate it. If you want to find something new in your life, walk through the doors of appreciation for what you have now. That results in opening things up so that you draw back to you the next thing in your life that will be fulfilling.

No matter what the situation is, there’s always something about people’s lives that they can appreciate. Focus on the things you can appreciate. Open your heart and see the world through the eyes of appreciation.

People want more peace and fulfillment in their lives. Those kinds of things come when we actually walk through the doors of appreciation. I don’t think we get there without that. Appreciating what is, is the first step.

Find things in your life to appreciate. If you’re in a job that’s hard for you, think about other things in your life that are good. Think about aspects of your job that you can appreciate or appreciate the fact that you have a job and that many people don’t.

That’s a starting point. It ignites a little fire. It comes from the heart. It’s got to be genuine. It can’t just be thought. It can’t just be a positive affirmation. It’s got to be a genuine, coming-‐from-‐the-‐core feeling of appreciation.

Appreciation is interesting because to me it’s like a magnetic energy that draws back to us the things that will be fulfilling. Even in a tough situation like that job, your first step is to appreciate. That opens the door for other things to possibly emerge.

The more we appreciate, the more opportunity we’re going to have for things to change and get better, for the job to get better, for a new job to show up, or for a different career path that makes sense. It starts with simple things, like appreciation for what we already have.


Dawson: That’s a paradox because we are so often taught that striving for something different is what ignites change. There’s certainly value in doing that, but the paradox is that change often begins when you are at peace with yourself and are no longer struggling against what there is. That relaxation opens the door for change.

Howard: I just remembered something else too. By the way, you’re bringing up some great memories for me, Dawson. This is fun. I don’t remember exactly the context, but I remember one time somebody was talking to our founder, Doc Childre. They asked him, “Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?” Doc said back to them, “I’ve never really had a problem with the concept that things are greener on the other side of the pasture because I’ve always been too busy appreciating whatever pasture I was in.”

I guess that’s the point. If we can appreciate whatever pasture we’re in instead of always focusing on what is out there that we don’t have, it begins to magnetize some new things to us. It starts there.

You’re right. It is a paradox. We can always have our hopes or dreams. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s about striving for more and all of those kinds of things. Let it be a heart-‐directed approach to all of that. Very often, even when we aspire to have certain things and approach it from an ambition-‐driven, go-‐for-‐it, get-‐what-‐I-‐want kind of methodology, it can produce results, but it does not necessarily produce fulfillment.

Dawson: We do find all of these people who wind up having climbed to some pinnacle of accomplishment, and who are yet still very dissatisfied and often not all that healthy. Certainly, they are lacking an inner peace. The end point of that kind of growth and pushing yourself is often an unhappy internal state.

Howard: It’s interesting. Perhaps you and the listeners have noticed something. Here’s what it is. Ambition is not bad. Like I said, hopes, dreams, aspirations, wanting to be better and achieve more, and all of that is okay. It has built the world we have today, and there are many wonderful things in our world. This raw ambition, drive, push, and thinking, “Get what I want without consideration for others,” doesn’t seem to be producing the same type of results it used to. It doesn’t seem to work the same way in today’s world. Often, it backfires. A lot of times, I see in people’s lives and other things, not just in individuals but also in collectives, that it actually produces a 180-‐degree different result from the one that was intended.

I believe it has to come now from a more heart-‐directed place that is more intuitive in nature, and certainly more caring and considerate about how whatever we want is going to affect others and the whole. It takes the edge off ambition, while allowing for the dreams and hopes to still be there. It puts it in a different context that then produces a different result.

Dawson: How do you know when you’re coming from that heart-‐directed place?

Howard: It’s interesting. It’s not thoughts or you’re going to get the 11th commandment or something when you do it. It’s a feeling you have inside of rightness, knowingness, and solidness. It takes some time to learn the difference and discriminate. That’s what a lot of the HeartMath tools and techniques are about. They give people more access to this in practical ways so they can begin to discriminate differently.

In a sense, it becomes a little self-‐experiment in sensing things inside us. They don’t have to be grandiose. Sometimes it’s just gentle nudges about things we need to do or not do. Sometimes it can be a little louder than that, about certain actions we need to take or things we should not be doing. It’s


learning to attune to the subtle inner dialogues and the feelings associated with them, not so much just the words or pictures in our heads.

What does it feel like inside? With a little practice, you get on to it and begin to see the difference and know when something feels a certain way. It gets into the energetics of consciousness really. Through the energetics of consciousness, we begin to approach life very differently. It’s a sensing and feeling process more than just a thinking process.

Dawson: You also said that you can evoke those feelings consciously and deliberately. It’s very powerful to realize that these feelings are under our conscious control. They don’t just happen to us. We’re actors in our drama. In fact, we may be the primary actors in our drama, and our consciousness is what’s steering that process, creating our outer life.

You mentioned mental pictures or words, and filling your awareness with those and making those constructive. That’s a very powerful thing to do that puts you in the driver’s seat. Suddenly, even though your external circumstances may not be to your liking in every possible way, you have the power in your consciousness to shape what happens there. That, of course, can shape everything outside of you as well.

Howard: I believe we’re shaping our lives more than we realize. The more conscious we become, the more we realize we are calling the shots on so much. Science is now showing definitively that we are all part of a connected system.

Everything is connected energetically. Everything on the planet and beyond our planet is connected through a vast web of energetic connections. I believe that we all live in a field of consciousness that is reflecting back to us, not just what we think in our minds, but also especially what we feel in our hearts. That interplay with the field of consciousness itself and what we feed that field is determining a lot about our own realities and lives. There are certain things that are beyond our control, but there are many things that we’re controlling more than we realize.

I believe that we are truly painting the picture of our own lives through what we feel, through the emotional output that we engage in moment to moment and day to day. Then we paint the picture of our lives with that.

We can choose the emotions. It’s not about repressing emotions. It’s about conscious choice of emotion, I believe. We can choose to paint with grays, blacks, and browns, and we get a picture of life that looks that way. That would be being down, being sad, depression, anger, judgment, and all of these kinds of things. We can paint a picture of life that way if we want to.

On the other hand, there’s a whole palette of colors available to us. They have a lot to do with heart-‐based emotions. We can paint with those colors as well. What we choose emotionally to feel has a lot to do with the picture of life we create.

Emotions are, in fact, sometimes reactions. Every thought and feeling has an emotion associated with it. There are emotional reactions. What I think people are beginning to understand now is that we have choice of emotion more than we realize.

If I get upset about something later today, that would be an emotional trigger. That would be part of life. That would be natural. What I do after that is my choice. Do I stay in that state, process it, churn it, rationalize it, go and explain what happened to somebody else to reinforce my own point, and all of those standard human things?


Do I stop in the moment and say, “This is not the Howard Martin I want to be right now. This is not who I am at a core, authentic level,” and use the power and intelligence of my heart to at least neutralize those feelings and more than likely shift them to something that feels a lot better and makes a lot more sense?

Dawson: Having the tools to do that is the key. That’s been the dilemma for centuries and generations. How do you break conditioned behaviors and thoughts? We have this habit of acting, thinking, and seeing the world in a certain way. By the time you’re 20 or 30 years old, these responses are so deeply ingrained that it’s often very difficult to shift and budge them. The process you’re describing there, where you take a step back and say, “Is this the person I want to be?” before you do and say that thing and enact that conditioned response, is so incredibly powerful because it gives you a chance to break that conditioning.

Howard: The good news is that the brain is changeable. You know that. It’s an area of expertise that you have. We have neural circuits, emotional circuits, amygdala programs, and all of these kinds of things that are storing emotional patterns. Yes, they can be hard to break.

There’s also the concept of neuroplasticity and the brain’s ability to create new pathways and use its neural connections in different ways. This is how we learn new things like a computer program, play golf, or do any of that. We develop new patterns and programs.

The same thing is 100% true about how we react emotionally to situations.

There’s another concept. HeartMath plays into these things. It’s the positive psychology movement, saying that the best way to begin to work out old psychological patterns in many cases, but not all, is not to try to focus on the negative pattern and figure that all out, but instead to engage with positive emotional states that begin to then reprogram that emotional circuitry. Then the positive emotions become more natural.

With HeartMath techniques, for example, some of those are called short-‐term behavioral change techniques where you engage with a positive emotion. You activate appreciation, care, love, or those kinds of things. You use different methods to do that. As you do that, it begins to change what you desire. The desired patterns become more open, positive, and beneficial, and some of the old patterns go away.

I’ve certainly seen that happen in my own life. An analogy I sometimes use is an emotional diet. We have emotions that are sort of standard for us that we have in our daily lives, just like foods that we eat that are standard. No emotion needs to be looked at as bad, but we can certainly choose a different emotional diet, just like many of us have chosen to change the food diets that we eat. It becomes a matter of choice.

Every time we see ourselves at a place where we are functioning in a way that we don’t like, can we find something else, more positive to focus on?

Can we begin to generate more care for another or more compassion for ourselves in those situations? That’s a great one to engage in. Rather than judging ourselves because we got angry, can we have compassion that we’re doing the best we can?

When we do that, it doesn’t take long before the desire of the emotional diet changes, meaning that we just don’t want certain emotions as much anymore. They become less natural and stick out more when we do have them.


It can change more quickly than we might think because of the concept that we can develop new patterns and changes in the neural circuitry in our brain and emotional topography, so to speak. That’s a lot of what we do here at HeartMath. We use the power and intelligence of the heart in many ways to help better regulate emotions, which has an impact on everything from our health to the energetic output we feed the field environment.

Dawson: What a good illustration of how psychology becomes physiology. As you move into that state of love and care, make those choices again and again, recondition yourself and go on an emotional diet of the things that you consciously want to have showing up in your life, you literally over time are rewiring the circuits of your brain.

Howard: Let me take it one step further as a fun way of describing it. We have emotional choice. Nobody can tell us what we need to feel because that gets into the repressing of the emotions and all of that. People don’t like that. The way I characterize it is this. I’m a grown man. I can eat what I want. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t eat. I can determine right now and make a deal with you, Dawson, saying, “For the next two days, I’m going on a new diet. It’s going to be the chocolate-‐cake diet. All I’m going to do is eat chocolate cake for the next two days because I can and want to, and nobody can tell me that I can't.”

That's true. I have that choice, but it wouldn't take long before my body responded to that diet. There's a response to that. The same can be said of an emotional diet. If I want to be judgmental of other people and overly critical, stay expectant of others to be like I want them to be, and be angry and irritated about all of that, nobody can stop me from doing that.

Guess what? There is a response to that emotional diet, right down to my physiology. Those emotions take away from our health and impact us at a physiological level that degenerates us. That has been documented in a number of ways now through scientific research. A little bit of it is HeartMath, but a lot of research has been done around that sort of thing.

I can eat chocolate cake if I want to. The body is going to know what I'm doing and respond. It doesn't care if I'm right or wrong. I can have negative emotions run through my system unbridled. If I just let them run, don't care about them, and let them happen, there's going to be a physiological effect that I'm going to have to deal with as a result of not being more balanced about what emotional diet I'm eating.

Dawson: Yes, and some of the research is showing that those physiological effects are not minor, subtle, or slight. They're enormous. One recent study looked at the differences between pessimists and optimists and longevity and found that what in the jargon of psychology is called a “pessimistic explanatory style” had a huge effect on lifespan. The difference in longevity was between seven and 15 years, an enormously big difference based simply on mental outlook and the kind of emotional diet you put yourself on. It's not just affecting you peripherally in a minor way. It's radically affecting your health and lifespan.

Howard: In another study we did, we tested DHEA and cortisol balance. These are two hormones we have in our body. They have a relationship to each other. Cortisol is generically called the stress hormone. It's produced in greater amounts when we're stressed. DHEA is called the anti-‐aging or vitality hormone. It’s your vitality-‐boosting hormone. These two hormones are produced by the same mother hormone, so to speak. It's called a precursor hormone, pregnenolone. Pregnenolone produces cortisol and DHEA.


In this study, we brought in 28 test subjects, 14 men and 14 women. We took readings on the cortisol and DHEA levels and sent those samples to an independent research lab in Seattle, Washington. We gave them a one-‐day HeartMath training and trained them with tools and techniques to help them use the intelligence of the heart to help better regulate emotions. They were instructed to practice for 30 days. In that time period, they were not allowed to make major changes in lifestyle, diet, exercise patterns, or any of that.

One month later, we brought them back and took the baseline samples of those hormones again. We sent them to the independent research lab. Our director of research got a call from the owner of the lab who said, “I'm seeing some major significant changes in these DHEA-‐cortisol balances. Can you tell me what they're taking?”

Over that 30-‐day period there had been a 100% increase in DHEA, accompanied by a 23% decrease in cortisol.

Dawson: That is a huge shift in one month. The lab I've used for cortisol tests says that it takes five months to produce any kind of a significant shift in cortisol levels. To produce that big of a drop in one month is an enormous result.

Howard: That's with no pharmaceutical intervention, which goes back to your point about how physiology and psychology are directly linked. By making changes in how they approach life emotionally and making the effort to move out of the negative emotional states in less time and all of that, people are able to experience these physiological changes.

The same study was actually done by one of our clients at the time, the big food conglomerate in Europe, Unilever. They saw very similar results. It was a replicable study.

What it was showing was that changes in our emotional behavior can affect the DHEA-‐cortisol balance, which is important because, as you know, high levels of cortisol have been linked to a variety and host of disease states, not to mention the fact that the high levels are bleeding off the vitality hormone DHEA.

Dawson: In fact, we disassemble DHEA molecules. Our bodies break those down if it's called upon to produce cortisol. When we're less stressed, our bodies then break down those unneeded cortisol molecules in just a few minutes and begin producing DHEA. Our stress levels are directly driving both that anti-‐aging hormone and that stress hormone.

Howard: Yes, it's very true.

Dawson: You may as well take charge of the process and do those things in consciousness. The thing that really puzzles me, though, Howard, is our civilization and Western medical culture is still so addicted to drugs.

One of the things I've written about recently is a drug called Risperidone. Between 2001 and 2011, the VA spent about $700 million on this drug. It was eventually discovered to be totally ineffective for PTSD, which is what they were prescribing it for. They spend $700 million over a decade on a drug, which a randomized controlled trial then showed to be ineffective for PTSD. We are mesmerized by these searches for drug cures. You see a headline in the paper every week for a drug for this and that, or a gene for this or that.

Often, we are so neglectful and underappreciate the power of simple behavioral shifts like those you're describing. What can people do to boost their performance and bring these kinds of values into their


lives in a practical way that'll help them deal better with the challenges they might face, whether financial, in business, in relationships, or in health?

Howard: The first thing is to acknowledge that you do have this heart intelligence. We haven't talked much about what it is specifically. It's a high-‐speed, intuitive intelligence that gives us the ability to discriminate differently and maintain more of the positive emotional states that lead to high performance. Positive emotions are high-‐performance states, simply stated.

There are techniques you can do. I'll share one very quickly, the Quick Coherence technique. It's certainly something everyone can do. We don't have a lot of time left in our interview, but it's three steps.

Focus your attention on the area in the center of your chest, the area of the heart. You can shift your attention anywhere in your body. In this case, focus on the area in the center of your chest.

As you do that, breathe naturally and normally and do what's called heart-‐focused breathing. As you breathe, pretend that your breath is coming in and out right through the center of your chest.

Maintain that heart-‐focused breathing. Keep doing that. Then try to feel a positive emotion, like appreciation for the good things in your life, the love or care you have for someone or something, the feeling you have inside when you know you've done something well, performed at your best, or any of those kinds of feelings.

Breathe through the heart and feel that positive emotion for a minute or two. We won't do it on our call today, but let me go through it again so that everyone listening can try to practice this on their own.

It's called heart focus. Focus your attention on the area of the heart. Heart-‐focused breathing is to breathe through the area of the heart. Pretend that the breath is coming through the heart. Then there’s the activation of a heart feeling.

Put those three steps together, and what you have is a simple tool that changes your physiology and psychological state very quickly. It's called a Quick Coherence technique. It puts you in a state of coherence, a highly ordered state, both physiologically and psychologically.

I use that all of the time in between meetings, driving in my car, when I wake up in the morning, and after something upsets me. These are little, simple things that we can do and little practices that are there.

The HeartMath system has a lot of different tools and techniques. This is the simplest of them all, but it's also one that has high utility because it comes in handy in so many different situations.

Dawson: I'm so grateful for you, your work, everyone at HeartMath, and the incredible way in which you're living heart so publicly and successfully and bringing it to a much bigger world.

Howard: When we put our heart into it, performance does increase. It never hurts to put our heart into anything that we do.

Links:

HeartMath Institute: http://www.heartmath.org/

Quick Coherence Technique: http://www.heartmath.com/personal-‐use/quick-‐coherence-‐technique.html

emWave: http://www.heartmathstore.com/category/emWave2

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