What Is the Purpose Of BrainTap and HRV?
Using BrainTap and an HRV Scan (Heart Rate Variability Scan) serves the purpose of offering a patient "evidence" of how their body is responding to stress, and how it may be subsequently degrading their health. BrainTap offers a scientifically proven, highly effective and simple solution.
The data acquired from the HRV scan answers these overarching questions:
"Are you handling your stress, or is your stress handling you?"
"How is stress affecting different parts of your body?"
"Is stress aging you prematurely?"
"How is stress affecting your metabolism?"
"Is stress depleting your brain function and energy levels?"
Doing the initial HRV scan and BrainTap session gives patients tangible, visual measurements, and objective data for what would normally be intangible physiological concepts concerning how their health may be suffering. The HRV shows how stress has major downstream effects on the body. It can serve as a motivator for patients, and a practical tool for the practitioner to monitor and resolve underlying issues at the root cause level. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
When used consistently, BrainTap can retrain the stress response at a deep subconscious level. The HRV serves as an assessment of a patient's health status as well as a determination of treatment efficiency. It is able to objectively measure the impact of integrative healing modalities that may include dietary, supplement, exercise, sleep, detoxification, and emotional/psychological rebalancing. The use of BrainTap and HRV provides a visual representation of the body's response to implemented treatment efforts and provides feedback, serving as a guide to gauge the success of or make changes to a treatment plan for improved results.
Who is BrainTap Appropriate For?
If you are experiencing health issues, poor sleep, mental focus, mood imbalances like depression and anxiety, hormonal dysregulation, chronic pain, or if you are feeling tired, overwhelmed, or stressed, BrainTap can help. Essentially, BrainTap is for most individuals, of any age and health status. Contraindications include those with extreme nervous system dysfunction and extreme neurological diseases such as epilepsy, or those who suffer from schizophrenia.
What Does the Initial Braintap Session Involve?
Your initial consultation with Carly Sage, M.S., will include an HRV scan and two short BrainTap meditation sessions, followed by a re-measure of the HRV scan to show how just one session of BrainTap can affect your nervous system and stress response.
An HRV scan is a painless, effortless scan of your heart rate variability, which requires you to simply sit and breathe for a few minutes while the machine captures a total of 300 heartbeats. The HRV scan measures how your nervous system is functioning based on your heart rhythms and patterns. The HRV scan provides concrete visible data about critical invisible processes and indicates how deeply stress is negatively affecting various parts of your physiology.
Carly will provide a detailed analysis of your biomarkers as shown by the HRV scan, and compare before and after results. You will leave with a printout of your results for further reading and clarification, and as a baseline to gauge progress in upcoming sessions and stress management efforts. General recommendations are provided, but for a more detailed therapeutic intervention, patients are encouraged to schedule a follow-up session with Carly to discuss short and long-term strategies to effectively mitigate overall stress and its harmful impact on mental, emotional, and physical health.
In each case, HRV scan will likely give a strong indication that something is off, but it will not identify the culprit for you. To effectively determine what is producing the abnormal HRV values, the practitioner and patient will determine meaningful context by establishing subjective and qualitative markers to add context to the HRV's quantitative data. Before collecting any objective data and starting an assessment, the full picture of an individual’s situation is evaluated using the Intake Form and conversation during the consultation. The combination of qualitative and quantitative data helps establish a much more meaningful baseline and helps with tracking progress and defining the end goal.
What Does the HRV Scan Measure?
- ECG recording with real-time monitoring of functional state in the body
- Stress Index (is stress low or high)
- Assessment of the state of the cardiovascular and nervous system (is the body in fight or flight, exhausted, or balanced)
- Assessment of the body’s neurohumoral regulation (energy and metabolism)
- Assessment of the body's current psycho-emotional state using the method of brain biorhythm mapping (is the brain stressed or balanced)
- Assessment of the body's adaptation level and level of harmonization of biological rhythms
- Determination of the patient’s biological age, determination of premature aging or reversed aging
- Simultaneous representation of two surveys’ results with a view of comparative analysis
How Does the HRV Scan Decode the Heartbeat?
The FFT, or Fast Fourier Transform, is a digital tool that analyzes the Heart Rate Signal using time and frequency algorithms, measuring periodic oscillations of the heart rate signal’s different frequencies and amplitudes. This provides information on the amount of their relative intensity (termed variance of power) in the heart's sinus rhythm as seen in the ECG.
The Fast Fourier Transform breaks down the ECG into its frequency-component bandwidths that correspond to specific parts of the nervous system, which regulates the body
- Low frequency (LF) corresponds to sympathetic nervous system regulation, or acute stress/fight or flight mode
- High frequency (HF) corresponds to parasympathetic regulation, or rest/digest/heal/detoxify mode
- Very low frequency (VLF) reflects the central nervous system (CNS) and its regulation through its downstream hormones accessed through HPA axis, as seen in "burn out" mode and a state of adrenal fatigue/exhaustion
What is Recommended Following the First BrainTap Session?
After a patient experiences the initial HRV and BrainTap session, it is recommended to participate in 3 or more BrainTap sessions per week for the next 4 weeks to see maximum results. Patients can book 1/2 hour appointments at their convenience at Tao to use the headset provided, or patients are encouraged to purchase their own headset for private use anytime in their home. Headsets are available for purchase at the front desk or by contacting us directly.
After the initial phase, it is recommended to make a follow-up appointment to retest every 4-6 weeks and compare your results and to gauge the effectiveness of the intervention strategies with both BrainTap and recommended lifestyle modifications.
Following the first consultation and subsequent follow-up session with Carly, the patient and practitioner will implement a plan that addresses the overall health goals and will measurably impact the chosen relevant metrics.
When re-testing, depending on the starting point and goals, a patient should expect to see noticeable changes in HRV within 1-3 months for most health-related goals and in as little as two weeks for fitness and training related goals. Determine an appropriate timeframe for which you would like to see progress. It is recommended to rescan every 4-6 weeks or 10-12 visits.
