S4-Episode 6: What HeartMath is and Why It Will Change Your Life

Are you stuck in a cycle of stress, overthinking, and reactivity?

In this episode of the Lemons and Pineapples Podcast, I dive into the powerful science of HeartMath — a research-backed method that helps you reset your nervous system, improve focus, and show up as a calmer, more resilient version of yourself.

I share:

- How I discovered HeartMath and why it became a game changer in my own life

- The link between heart rate variability (HRV), mental health, and brain function

- Why stress and reactivity wreak havoc on your body, emotions, and productivity

- How HeartMath techniques bring your heart, brain, and emotions into coherence

- Real-life results from my clients who’ve learned these tools

-An introduction to my 6-Week Nervous System Reset Coaching Program, where I guide you through practical techniques to retrain your nervous system, calm overthinking, and manage stress with ease.

Whether you’re facing burnout, struggling with decision-making, or simply want to feel more grounded, HeartMath offers tools that are simple, measurable, and truly life-changing.

👉 Resources & Links Mentioned in This Episode:

Watch my Instagram video on Heart Rate Variability (HRV) in action → HERE

Learn more about my 6-Week Nervous System Reset Coaching Program → HERE

Book a free connection call → HERE

Follow me on Instagram → @emmaobriencoach

✨ If chronic stress, overthinking, or feeling stuck is holding you back, this episode will show you a new way forward — one heartbeat at a time.

If you’re done playing small and ready to lead yourself — you’re in the right place.

I’m Emma O’Brien — Martha Beck trained and certified life coach, HeartMath practitioner, and shamanic healer helping high-achieving women stop second-guessing themselves and finally trust their own voice.

Through nervous system re-calibration, strategic coaching, and deep energetic work, I help you move from self-doubt to self-trust so you can create a life you actually want to be in — no external approval required.

🌀 Want to work together?

Explore the 6-week Nervous System Reset, 1:1 coaching, or Shamanic Soul Retrieval sessions here: emmaobriencoach.com

Questions or ready to chat?

DM me on Instagram @emmaobriencoach
or book a free connection call HERE.

Transcript

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Emma O'Brien: Hi folks, a very warm welcome to Season 4, Episode 6 of the Lemons and Pineapples podcast with me, Emma O'Brien. In today's episode, I'm going to be talking to you about HeartMath, what it is.

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Emma O'Brien: And why it is a game changer when it comes to really being able to up your productivity, manage your stress better, and as I like to say, often to human better, to show up better in your day-to-day life.

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Emma O'Brien: I stumbled across HeartMath quite by accident in the beginning of 2022 after a conversation with a friend of mine who was sharing how she'd read an article

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Emma O'Brien: that there'd been some research done into the effects of, activity on the sun.

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Emma O'Brien: on our overall day-to-day health and wellness. And this was a study that was done by the HeartMath Institute, and they found that when there is a lot of activity on the sun, there are solar flares, and there's radiation being kicked out from the sun, there was an increase in hospital admissions for things like heart attacks and mental health.

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Emma O'Brien: problems, which I thought was really interesting. So off I went, down the rabbit hole.

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Emma O'Brien: And I thought, this really appeals to me, so I trained to be a hot math coach.

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Emma O'Brien: And I want to share with you, really, on a more grounded level, why I'm such a big fan of HeartMath, why I teach it, and why I'm sharing this with you today, because I'm a really big proponent of it.

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Emma O'Brien: Essentially, it is a science-backed methodology that allows you to balance your nervous system.

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Emma O'Brien: By getting in touch with your heart's innate intelligence, and using your heart rhythms to be able to influence what's happening in your brain, which then, of course, influences how you're feeling, and how you are behaving and how you are showing up.

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Emma O'Brien: It's something I practice, and it's something that I can say has been an absolute game changer. I used to be very reactive.

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Emma O'Brien: very stressed. I have been through an episode of burnout, which I've talked about on the… on the podcast before.

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Emma O'Brien: And really living life at the mercy of everything that was coming at me.

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Emma O'Brien: So there's a cognitive behavioural model which talks to the fact that when we have circumstances in life, essentially those circumstances are completely neutral. We then have thoughts about those circumstances which give them meaning.

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Emma O'Brien: The thoughts that we have about those circumstances create an emotional reaction within ourselves.

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Emma O'Brien: That emotional reaction influences how we behave. So if we look at that on a level of stress, we might have something happen, an email comes into the inbox.

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Emma O'Brien: We have a thought about it, of, oh my god, not this person. Again, I told them I was gonna deal with this, and now they're nagging me again. And it sets off a feeling of anger, or frustration, or irritability.

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Emma O'Brien: Which might mean you snap at the next person who comes walking past and asks you for something, or, in your complete moment of stress and reactivity, yeah, tippy-tap an email in response and tell this person where you'd like them to go.

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Emma O'Brien: And of course, what happens when we are moving through the world in a state of reactivity is we continue to perpetuate life being more difficult for ourselves.

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Emma O'Brien: Hot math is a set of techniques that allow us to get a handle on that emotional state.

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Emma O'Brien: And not have our lives ruled by it.

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Emma O'Brien: When you're better able to regulate your emotions, and you can then start to think about the thought patterns you're having, but when we are calmer, generally we're going to be having less of a problem with repeated negative thoughts, and when we are calmer, and we have access to responsive… responsiveness rather than reactivity.

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Emma O'Brien: Life somehow smooths out. There's nothing woo-woo about this. It's a bit woo-woo about, you know, solar flares on the sun, but there's nothing woo-woo about this, because it's measurable in real time, and it really works! Seen it work with lots of people, it's worked for me, and it really is. It's an amazing, amazing set of techniques, it's why I'm so passionate about it.

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Emma O'Brien: What HeartMath essentially talks to…

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Emma O'Brien: is bringing your heart, your brain, and your emotions into coherence by being able to, on demand, balance your nervous system responses. So, of course, we've got

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Emma O'Brien: two parts of our nervous system. I'm going to talk more about this in the next podcast, so keep an eye out for that. But we have a parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest and digest state, and we have our sympathetic nervous system, which is the one that puts us into fight or flight.

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Emma O'Brien: And it is that fight-or-flight response that generally causes us all manner of problems when we aren't able to come out of it.

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Emma O'Brien: When you are constantly in fight or flight, you're chronically stressed.

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Emma O'Brien: A, you don't have access to good thinking capacity, because you're constantly in your reactive, alarm system, danger scanning bit of your brain.

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Emma O'Brien: B, you're not going to be behaving brilliantly well, so it just perpetuates more of the same, and it…

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Emma O'Brien: causes huge wear and tear on your body. To be constantly in a state of producing cortisol, it's an inflammatory stress hormone when we're having that pumped into our systems all the time.

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Emma O'Brien: It essentially just knackers your earthly vehicle.

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Emma O'Brien: And it's very bad for your heart, because your heart is constantly in an elevated state, it is, working too hard all the time, because you're in a stress response.

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Emma O'Brien: This is why people who are chronically stressed have heart attacks and strokes and hypertension.

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Emma O'Brien: What HeartMath does is it allows you

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Emma O'Brien: To bounce between a stress response and a calm nervous system.

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Emma O'Brien: The way it's measured, this is where the heart bit comes in, is through your heart rhythms. So.

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Emma O'Brien: our hearts all, you know, they're all beating until they're not. If you're listening to this, you don't have a pulse. Amazing, I'm so glad I've reached you on the other side.

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Emma O'Brien: But what HeartMath do is they are… they measure heart rate variability. That is the tool that they use, and there's some biofeedback tools that, HeartMath supply.

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Emma O'Brien: I've done a video just to show what biofeedback and heart rate variability looks like in real time. I've popped it on Instagram, there's a link in the show notes here. So what's happening when we're using the HeartMath tools, because like I said, this is science-backed, it's not kind of, you know, it's not woo-woo.

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Emma O'Brien: is you're being able to measure your heart rate variability, and how it changes when you change your emotional state. So there's lots of other bits in here about tapping into heart intelligence, and we could go off on lots of tangents, but I want to try and keep this cohesive and simple.

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Emma O'Brien: What we're doing is looking at heart rate variability. So, when you are experiencing something like anger, frustration, irritability, agitation.

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Emma O'Brien: If we look at your heart rate variability on a biofeedback device, you'll see your heart's, your heart's rhythms are very jagged, they're all kind of all over the show, and your heart rate variability will be quite low. That is, the difference between the beat-to-beat changes won't be, won't be very much.

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Emma O'Brien: So, you might have a resting heart rate when you're stressed of about 85 or 90 beats per minute, which is high.

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Emma O'Brien: It's high to keep your heart in that state all the time, but you might find that the difference really goes between 85 and 90 beats per minute. Of course, our hearts aren't beating if we're at 85 beats per minute.

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Emma O'Brien: On average.

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Emma O'Brien: it's not beating regularly, like a metronome. It's changing all the time. So heart rate variability measures the change, and if there isn't very much change in the speed, effectively.

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Emma O'Brien: it is a sign that you are in a chronically stressed state. When we're in a chronically stressed state, and we've got these jagged heart rhythms, and we've got low heart rate variability.

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Emma O'Brien: Everything else in the earthly vehicle is thrown off. Your hormone balance is off.

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Emma O'Brien: Your cardiovascular system is obviously working very hard. You're kicking out lots of stress hormones, which are affecting everything else. So, when we have stress happen, it's a global change that happens within our bodies.

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Emma O'Brien: Conversely, when you are experiencing positive emotions, which is what the thing that HeartMath teaches you to on-demand change your state from a chronic stress state into a more,

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Emma O'Brien: useful, calming, and nourishing state of being. If you measure someone's heart rate variability when they are actively in a state of appreciation, gratitude, care.

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Emma O'Brien: Or, calm.

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Emma O'Brien: you'll see, there's greater variance between the beat-to-beat changes. So you might find someone's average resting heart rate is 70 beats per minute whilst they're practicing heart math tools, but the changes go from 60 beats per minute up to 90, so there's a much greater

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Emma O'Brien: difference between those beat-to-beat changes, which is a really great indicator of your health. And of course, if we look at those heart rhythms, they are smooth.

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Emma O'Brien: The waves are smooth, and they are kind of… there's a big differential between them.

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Emma O'Brien: And that is… being in heart coherence. And when we have coherent heart rhythms.

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Emma O'Brien: We have access to higher levels of thinking, we have a system that is in homeostasis, so our hormone systems are in balance, our bodies aren't having to work really hard, we can just kind of exist in a calm state.

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Emma O'Brien: And of course, there, you're not in your brain's alarm system, you are not constantly scanning for threats, you are not reactive, you are able to be responsive.

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Emma O'Brien: I think if I put my interpretation on heart math.

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Emma O'Brien: Is… they talk about being able to access your heart's innate intelligence.

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Emma O'Brien: I think it gives you access to your intuition, it gives you access to be able to listen to your wisest bit of yourself. Which, as anybody who has been chronically stressed will tell you, it's really difficult to focus on something that's on a page in front of you to read a sentence. You might have to read it 10 times.

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Emma O'Brien: So, you're not going to be making good decisions when you're in that stressed state. Whereas, when you can use the heart math tools, you can bring yourself out of that stress state into a state of coherence, and you've got access to…

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Emma O'Brien: Calm, clearer thinking.

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Emma O'Brien: And all of the things that make life better and better.

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Emma O'Brien: Easier for us.

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Emma O'Brien: So.

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Emma O'Brien: it could go… I could spend 3 hours talking about it, so it's to… to share why I'm delivering this to you today.

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Emma O'Brien: is I have seen in the recalibration course that I've just been running with my, co-host and partner, Sam Shrosbury.

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Emma O'Brien: I have seen, over the course of 5 weeks, how learning these HeartMath tools has been a game changer for the ladies that we have on the course.

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Emma O'Brien: When you are able to drop out of this frenetic, frantic, stressed state, and just slow everything down enough so you can start to see things through a lens of calm, rather than a lens of stress and a lens of frustration.

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Emma O'Brien: You can show up very, very differently in your life.

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Emma O'Brien: So, I have put this into a one-on-one coaching nervous system reset course. So, if you're listening to this, and you're curious about it.

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Emma O'Brien: It's a course I run

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Emma O'Brien: We work one-on-one for 6 weeks, for an hour of time, at a week, and I will run you through the set of heart math techniques. They start with heart-focused breathing, which is a really, really simple technique for being able to just access some calm, and then the techniques build on each other.

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Emma O'Brien: And what I've found when people are doing this work over a period of time, because it's retraining your nervous system, it's retraining your brain to behave differently, and it's putting you back in charge of your internal landscape.

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Emma O'Brien: Rather than having you at the mercy of everything that's being flung at you from the outside all the time.

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Emma O'Brien: Over time, This is… is life-changing.

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Emma O'Brien: Because when you are able to take a pause before you have a reaction to something, you're able to calm racing thoughts, something that I see often with people is overthinking. I can't make a decision, got too many things to think about, what if this happens, what if that happens, what if this happens, what about this, what about this? God, what if there's something I haven't even thought about here?

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Emma O'Brien: HotMath allows you to just calm that internal chatter down.

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Emma O'Brien: So you can sit, and quite rationally.

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Emma O'Brien: Think about something, and then start to take action.

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Emma O'Brien: It'll get you moving forwards, it'll get you being more productive, and it just tapers back and tones down that reactivity that I think a lot of us are very familiar with, either being the person who's being reactive or being on the receiving end of it, which is actually just horrid.

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Emma O'Brien: So if you'd like to know more about this, you are very welcome to check the show notes. There's a link to my 6-Week Nervous System Reset coaching program that I've got there. You can have a look at what happens, what's included, how it works, and if you'd like to talk to me more about it, you are welcome to just book a free connection call with me.

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Emma O'Brien: I am really passionate about this work, and I'm really excited to be offering this as a… this is quite a new… a new course that I'm doing, a new program that I'm offering.

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Emma O'Brien: because I've seen the impact of this work, when it's put into play, and how it ripples out, it will help you in the short term, because it'll help you cope better, it gives you better strategic skills.

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Emma O'Brien: But it also ripples out into your place of work, it ripples out into a family, it ripples out… when you start to show up.

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Emma O'Brien: As a calmer, more grounded version of you.

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Emma O'Brien: it has a huge impact on the people around you, and that's something I've absolutely found in my own life, and I've seen it with the people I've coached.

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Emma O'Brien: So, I would invite you, if chronic stress is a big problem for you, if overthinking is a problem for you, if feeling kind of lost and stuck is a problem.

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Emma O'Brien: If you feel like you just can't cope, because there's just so much happening, and nothing's really moving forwards, because you're constantly just firefighting as opposed to being strategic about things, this is for you.

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Emma O'Brien: So I invite you to book a call, get in touch with me, you can also just pop me a message on Instagram, I'm at EmmaOBrienCoach, and you can also find on Instagram, I've popped a link in the show notes to the video, where I give you an actual, some visuals of heart rate variability in action, because I think it's one of those things, you look at it and go, wow, that's really very exciting.

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Emma O'Brien: Thank you for being with me today. Keep an eye out for the next episode, where I'm going to be talking more about, nervous system regulation and a bit more understanding about how your nervous system works, because this is a big part of the HeartMath strategy, is balancing that nervous system out. So keep an eye out for that, and I will see you again soon. Bye for now!