It was 5:45 A.M. on Tuesday morning, February 6, 1995. We were at HeartMath's business center in Boulder Creek, California. Dr. Donna Willis, the medical editor for NBC's Today show, had called the previous afternoon to say that they'd decided to run a segment on our work the next morning. They were going to call it "Love and Health." Dr. Willis would start off with an overview of the Institute of HeartMath's research about the electrical energy produced by the heart. Then she'd go on to tell Bryant Gumbel and the viewers about our FREEZE-FRAME technique, which uses the power of the heart to manage the mind and emotions.

"We'll have only a few seconds to give them your number," Dr. Willis said, "but you might want to put some of your people on the phones, just in case."

With little time to prepare, we quickly arranged for our staff to come in early to handle any callsand it was lucky we did! As soon as the phone number appeared on the screen, the switchboard lit up. For the rest of that day and into the night, then all day long the next day, we fielded calls almost continuously. Each time the show aired in a new time zone, another wave of calls came in.

We talked to thousands of people from all over the countryfrom anonymous parents in big-city ghettos to leaders in science, medicine, business, education, and religion. Before it was over, we'd gotten calls from around the worldall from a four-minute segment on a national television show that flashed our phone number on the screen for five short seconds. Why was that brief mention of the heart so magnetic?

The people who called us knew instinctively that the heart played an important role in their overall well-being. "I knew it all along," they said, and now they were eager to find out more. They wanted to know how their thoughts and feelings could be used to improve their healthmentally, emotionally, and physically. Otherspeople who associated the heart with lovewondered what they could do to bring more "heart" into their lives.

This immediate response further confirmed our long-standing belief that people are ready to put the heart to work in their lives. Without knowing the specifics, they sense that loving, positive feelings are somehow related to health, and they do their best to encourage those feelings in their lives.

Most people would rather feel loving and appreciative than resentful and depressed. But often the world around us seems to be spinning out of control. Despite our best intentions, it's hard to maintain our emotional equilibrium when we're confronted every daysometimes every hourwith stressful situations.

We've all been told, at one time or another, to follow our hearts. And it sounds like a great idea, in principle. But the problem is that actually following our heartsand loving people, including ourselvesis much easier said than done. Where do we begin? People talk about following their hearts, but nobody shows us how to do it. What does following the heart really mean? And how do we love ourselves? Aside from love's being a nice sentiment, why should we love other people? We'll show you a practical, systematic approach to answering these questions for yourself and outline the enormous benefits you'll reap in doing so.

Over the past twenty years, scientists have discovered new information about the heart that makes us realize it's far more complex than we'd ever imagined. We now have scientific evidence that the heart sends us emotional and intuitive signals to help govern our lives. Instead of simply pumping blood, it directs and aligns many systems in the body so that they can function in harmony with one another. And although the heart is in constant communication with the brain, we now know that it makes many of its own
decisions.

Because of this new evidence, we have to rethink our entire attitude toward "following our hearts." At the Institute of HeartMath (IHM), scientists have found that the heart is capable of giving us messages and helping us far more than anyone ever suspected. Throughout this book, we'll share the research that provides new evidence of the power of heart intelligence. And we'll show how that intelligence can have a measurable impact on our decision-making, our health problems, our productivity at work, our children's learning ability, our families, and the overall quality of our lives.

It's time to reexamine the heart. As a society, we need to take the concept of heart out of confinement in religion and philosophy and put it right in the "street," where it's needed most. The HeartMath Solution is a comprehensive system that will give you new information about heart intelligence; new tools, techniques, and exercises to access that intelligence; and instructions and examples regarding how and when to apply it to make your life better.

The biomedical, psychological, and social science research presented in this book provides the underpinnings of the HeartMath Solution. As you learn and apply this system, you'll rapidly gain new solutions to problems, new insights, and an expanded understanding of yourself, other people, society, and life itself.

The heart isn't mushy or sentimental. It's intelligent and powerful, and we believe that it holds the promise for the next level of human development and for the survival of our world.

As we enter the new millennium, our increasingly global society is faced with daunting challenges. The world's power structures are changing. Leaders are suffering from a lack of credibility. Technology is rapidly linking the world through satellite TV and the Internet, creating both opportunity and challenge. More nations are gaining nuclear capabilities. Threats of terrorism, global weather changes, and uncertainty prevail. Many important institutions and systems that we rely on for security and order are in disarray.

Largely because of all this change, stress is at an all-time high. As Albert Einstein said years ago, "The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." Developing the capacity to deal with the challenge of living in a stressful, ever-changing world is now more important than ever. To live happily and healthily in all the turmoil that progress brings requires exploring new ideas.

Hundreds of years ago it was obvious to everyone that the earth was flat. That fact was clearly observable; the earth extended as far as one could see. When the means to travel further and take a better look became available, however, everything changed. In the fifteenth century, the explorations of Columbus and Magellan proved to the world what Copernicus had already calculated mathematically: despite appearances, the earth is round. Then Galileo verified Copernicus's theory that the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. In the span of a few decades, our world had been turned upside down.

In the realm of the heart, the Magellans have returned with news of strange new lands. They tell us, "Our old models were based on limited information." [1] New discoveries now reveal that within each of us there exists an organizing and central intelligence that can lift us beyond our problems and into a new experience of fulfillment even in the midst of chaos. It's a high-speed, intuitive source of wisdom and clear perception, an intelligence that embraces and fosters both mental and emotional intelligence. We call it "heart intelligence."

Heart intelligence is the intelligent flow of awareness and insight that we experience once the mind and emotions are brought into balance and coherence through a self-initiated process. This form of intelligence is experienced as direct, intuitive knowing that manifests in thoughts and emotions that are beneficial for ourselves and others.

The HeartMath Solution provides a systematic way to consciously activate and develop this heart intelligence. With that solution, we can learn to expand our awareness and bring new coherence to our lives. In short, we can go beyond the brain.


Early Exploration of the Heart

When I (Doc) founded the Institute of HeartMath in 1991, my colleagues and I embarked upon an in-depth study of the literature and research published on the heart. Having experienced significant improvements in our own lives through the practice of listening to and following our hearts, we turned our curiosity to the investigation of how and why that process works. We asked ourselves, "Does the heart operate simply under the direction of the brain, or does it possess an intelligence of sorts that has influence on our mind and emotions?" We wanted to understand how the physical heart communicates with the body and how it influences our whole system.

Although the words "heart" and "math" are rarely used together, I felt that this thought-provoking combination reflected the two most essential aspects of our work. The word "heart" has meaning to almost everyone, of course. When we think of "heart," we think of the physical heart as well as qualities such as wisdom, love, compassion, courage, and strengththe higher aspects of all human beings. The word "math" resonates with most people as well. In the context of "HeartMath," it refers to the stepping-stones of the systemthe nuts-and-bolts approach to systematically unfolding "heart" qualities. It also refers to physiological and psychological equations for accessing and developing the incredible potential of the heart. The term "HeartMath" thus represents the importance of both fire and precision in our exploration of the heart.

For centuries, poets and philosophers have sensed that the heart is at the center of our lives. Saint-Exupry, perhaps the most spontaneously boyish author of our time, wrote, "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." [2]

The world's languages are filled with idioms about the heart. We use them to express our instinctive knowledge that the heart is the source of our higher qualities. When people a r e sincere, we often say that they're "speaking from the heart." When they throw themselves into an activity, we say that they're doing it "with all their heart." When people betray their own best interests, we comment that they're "thinking with their head, not their heart." And when they fall into despair, we worry that they've "become disheartened." Even our gestures indicate the importance we give to the heart: when people point to themselves, they generally point toward the heart.

In our explorations, we paid close attention to what had been written and said about the heart throughout history, wondering if there was more to this word "heart" than mere metaphor. If our culture were the only one to use the heart as a metaphor for high-quality feelings, we could consider it nothing more than a provincial turn of phrase, passed down through our ancestors. But over the centuries, the heart has been spoken of as a source of wisdom and feeling in almost all cultures. And many religions refer to the heart as the seat of the soul or the connecting place between spirit and humanness.

One of the observations that intrigued us most is that, throughout the ages, the heart has been referred to as a source not only of virtue but also of intelligence. The role of the heart as an intelligence within the human system is one of the most prevalent themes in ancient traditions and in inspirational writing. Blaise Pascal stated, "We know the truth not only by reason, but also by the heart." Lord Chesterfield wrote, "The heart has such an influence over the understanding that it is worth while to engage it in our interest." And Thomas Carlyle concluded, "It is the heart that always sees, before the head can see."

Many ancient cultures, including the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Greeks, maintained that the primary organ capable of influencing and directing our emotions, our morality, and our decision-making ability was the heart; and they consequently attached enormous emotional and moral significance to its behavior.

Similar perspectives are found in the Hebrew and Christian bibles as well as in Chinese, Hindu, and Islamic traditions. The Old Testament saying in Proverbs 23:7, "For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he," is further developed in the New Testament in Luke 5:22, "What reason ye in your hearts?"; these are but two examples. And in ancient Judaic tradition, the heart center, one of the Sefirot (energy centers) is known as Tif fer et (beauty, harmony, balance).

In the Kabbalah the heart is the Central Sphere, the only one of ten to touch all the others, and it's reputed to hold the key to the mysteries of radiant health, joy, and wellbeing. The aspect of balance and the attainment of bodily equilibrium is also attributed to the heart in Yogic traditions, which recognize the heart as the seat of individual consciousness, the center of life. In Yogic practice, the physical heart is considered both literally and figuratively the guide or internal "guru," and to this end, many Yogic practices cultivate an awareness of one's own heartbeat.

In traditional Chinese medicine, the heart is seen as the seat of connection between the mind and the body, forming a bridge between the two. It's said that the heart-blood houses the shen, which can be translated as both "mind" and "spirit." Thus the mind or spirit is housed in the heart, and the blood vessels are the communication channels that carry the heart's vital rhythmic messages throughout the body, keeping everything working in synchrony. It isn't surprising, then, that Chinese medicine holds that the state of each bodily organ as well as the body's integral functioning as a whole can be assessed via the pulse of the heart.

Whereas in the West, thought is seen as exclusively a function of the brain, the Chinese language itself represents a different perspective. The Chinese characters for " thinking," "thought," "intent," "listen," "virtue," and "love" all include the character for "heart." An ancient Chinese dictionary describes "silk threads" that connect the brain and heart. In the Japanese language there are two distinct words to describe the heart: shinzu denotes the physical organ, while kokoro refers to the "mind of the heart."

All these conceptions have a common view of the heart as harboring an "intelligence" that operates independent of the brain yet in communication with it. Are all of the cultures that share this view simply incorrect, perhaps not scientifically sophisticated enough to understand intelligence?


A New Understanding of the Heart

Despite the colorful heart metaphors that enrich the many languages of the world, most of us have been taught that the heart is just a ten-ounce muscle that pumps blood and maintains circulation until we die. When something goes wrong, you hire a technician (called a doctor) to repair the organ. If worse comes to worst, you replace your pump with another one from someone who just died. This biological view sees the heart as a working partone devoid of independent intelligence or emotion.

Looked at biologically, the heart's efficiency is amazing. The heart works without interruption for seventy to eighty years, without care or cleaning, without repair or replacement. Over a period of seventy years, it beats one hundred thousand times a day, approximately forty million times a year?nearly three billion pulsations all told. It pumps two gallons of blood per minutewell over one hundred gallons per hourthrough a vascular system about sixty thousand miles in length (over two times the circumference of the earth). [3]

The heart starts beating in the unborn fetus before the brain has been formed. Scientists still don't know exactly what triggers the beating, but they use the word "autorhythmic" to indicate that the heartbeat is self-initiated from within the heart.

As the brain begins to develop, it grows from the bottom up. Starting from the most primitive part of the brain (the brainstem), the emotional centers (the amygdala and the hippocampus) begin to emerge. It is well known to brain researchers that the thinking brain then grows out of the emotional regions. That speaks volumes about the relationship of thought to feeling. In an unborn child there's an emotional brain long before there's a rational one, and a beating heart before either.

While the source of the heartbeat is within the heart itself, the timing of the beat is thought to be controlled by the brain through the autonomic nervous system. But surprisingly enough, the heart doesn't need a hardwired connection to the brain to keep beating. For example, when someone has a heart transplant, the nerves that run from the brain to the heart are severed, and surgeons don't yet know how to reconnect them. But that doesn't stop the heart from functioning: after surgeons have implanted a heart and restored its beat in a new person's chest, the heart keeps beatingthough there's no longer any connection to the brain.

The Brain in the Heart

In recent years, neuroscientists have made an exciting discovery. They've found that the heart has its own independent nervous systema complex system referred to as "the brain in the heart." There are at least forty thousand neurons (nerve cells) in the heartas many as are found in various subcortical centers in the brain. [4] The heart's intrinsic brain and nervous system relay information back to the brain in the cranium, creating a two-way communication system between heart and brain. The signals sent from the heart to the brain affect many areas and functions in the amygdala, the thalamus, and the cortex.

The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure deep inside the brain's emotional processing system. It specializes in strong emotional memories. The cortex is where learning and reasoning occur. It helps us solve problems and determine right from wrong. The amygdala, the thalamus, and the cortex work closely together. When new information comes in, the amygdala assesses it for emotional significance. It looks for associations, comparing what's familiar in emotional memory with this new information coming into the brain. Then it communicates with the cortex to determine what actions would be appropriate. [5]

The discovery that the heart has its own nervous systema "brain" that affects the amygdala, the thalamus, and the cortexhelps to explain what physiologists John and Beatrice Lacey of the Fels Research Institute realized in the 1970s. At that time, it was known that the body's nervous system connected the heart with the brain, but scientists presumed that the brain made all the decisions. The Laceys' research showed that something else was happening.

The Laceys found that when the brain sent "orders" to the heart through the nervous system, the heart didn't automatically obey. Instead, the heart responded as if it had its own distinctive logic. Sometimes when the brain sent an arousal signal to the body in response to stimuli, the heartbeat sped up accordingly. But frequently it actually slowed down while the other organs responded with arousal. The selectivity of the heart's response indicated that it wasn't merely mechanically responding to a signal from the brain. Rather, the heart's response appeared to depend on the nature of the particular task at hand and the type of mental processing it required.

Even more intriguing, the Laceys found that the heart appeared to be sending messages back to the brain that the brain not only understood but obeyed. And it looked as though these messages from the heart could actually influence a person's behavior. [6]

The Laceys and others discovered that our heartbeats aren't just the mechanical throbs of a diligent pump, but an intelligent language that significantly influences how we perceive and react to the world. Subsequent researchers also discovered that the rhythmic beating patterns of the heart are transformed into neural impulses that directly affect the electrical activity of the higher brain centersthose involved in cognitive and emotional processing. [79]

In the 1970s, the Laceys' ideas were considered controversial. Yet even then, forwardlooking thinkers glimpsed the depth and scope of these implications about the heart. In 1977, Dr. Francis Waldrop, then director of the National Institute of Mental Health, stated in a review article of the Laceys' work that "in the long run, their research may tell us much about what makes each of us a whole person and may suggest techniques that can restore a distressed person to health." [10]

One of our goals, as we pursued the HeartMath Solution, was to take the Laceys' work still further. They had established the heart's capacity to (in effect) "think for itself" under certain circumstances. We wanted to understand how the heart formulates its logic and influences behavior.


What Is Intelligence?
For decades researchers have sought to understand the nature of intelligence. The first IQ tests were designed early in this century to measure intelligence as cognitive ability and intellect, and our school systems were geared up to help people develop both. Because it was found that IQ scores didn't increase much between kindergarten and adulthood, no matter how much education people received, many IQ experts argued that intelligence is inherited and can't be changed. They endorsed widely different estimates of the heritability of intelligence, ranging from 40 percent to 80 percent. [11]

Then in 1985 Howard Gardner published his research on "multiple intelligences" in his book Frames of Mind, which challenged our assumptions about intelligence. Gardner determined that intelligence is far more than mere intellect. He argued that the human system has many types of independent intelligences, including logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily/kinesthetic, intrapersonal (dealing with self-knowledge), and interpersonal (dealing with knowledge of others). Gardner's research caused many people to reconsider the traditional view of intelligence as a one-dimensional construct and to think in new ways about the factors that determine personal, social, and professional success. [12] His discoveries stimulated educators to write new curricula to help children learn through their dominant intelligence. For example, children with high bodily/kinesthetic intelligence are taught math using physical games and movements to increase learning ability, comprehension, and retention.

Later in the 1980s John Mayer, a University of New Hampshire psychologist, and Peter Salovey of Yale co-formulated a new theory of "emotional intelligence" that shapes the quality of our intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships. Mayer and Salovey's definition of emotional intelligence includes five domains: knowing one's emotions; managing one's emotions; motivating oneself; recognizing emotions in others; and handling relationships. [13] Developing emotional intelligence involves the self-awareness of "becoming aware of both our mood and our thoughts about our mood." [11]

Reuven Bar-On, a clinical psychologist and lecturer in medicine at the Tel Aviv University Medical School, coined the term "emotional quotient" (or "EQ") in 1985. Bar-On devoted more than fifteen years of research to developing a formal psychological survey that aims to measure people's emotional intelligence. Based on his research and results, Bar-On summarized the qualities that contribute to emotional intelligence as follows:

In 1996 Daniel Goleman wrote his groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence. Goleman's exhaustive research confirmed that success in life is based more on our ability to manage our emotions than on our intellectual capabilities and that a lack of success is more often than not due to our mismanagement of emotions. His research helps explain why many individuals with a high IQ falter in life while others with only a modest IQ do exceptionally well. According to Goleman, the good news about emotional intelligence is that, unlike IQ, it can be developed and increased throughout life.

In his book, Goleman says that the ABCs of emotional intelligence include "self-awareness, seeing the links between thoughts, feelings and reactions; knowing if thoughts or feelings are ruling a decision; seeing the consequences of alternative choices; and applying these insights to choices."

This level of keen perception is a tall order for most people. In our fast-paced lives today, how do we stop to figure all these subtle factors out? How can we find emotional intelligence in the thick of an argument or an important business negotiationa high-stakes situation in which we must make choices quickly? And how can we increase emotional intelligence in our society as a whole? "The question," Goleman says, "is how can we bring intelligence to our emotionsand civility to our streets and caring to our communal life?" [11]


Cultivating Heart Intelligence

T he answer lies in cultivating heart intelligence. It's our theory that heart intelligence actually transfers intelligence to the emotions and instills the power of emotional management. In other words, heart intelligence is really the source of emotional intelligence. From our research at the Institute of HeartMath, we've concluded that intelligence and intuition are heightened when we learn to listen more deeply to our own heart. It's through learning how to decipher the messages we receive from our heart t h at we gain the keen perception needed to effectively manage our emotions in the midst of life's situations and challenges. The more we learn to listen to and follow our heart intelligence, the more educated, balanced, and coherent our emotions become.

Without the guiding influence of the heart, we easily fall prey to reactive emotions such as insecurity, anger, fear, and blame, as well as other energy-draining reactions and behaviors. It's this lack of emotional management that brings incivility to our homes and streets and a lack of caring to our interactions with othersnot to mention illness and accelerated aging.

Early in the Institute's research, we observed that when negative emotions threw the nervous system out of balance, they created heart rhythms that appeared jagged and disordered. [15] It was easy to see that a chronic state of nervous system and cardiovascular imbalance would put stress on the heart and other organs that could potentially lead to serious health problems.

Positive emotions, by contrast, were found to increase order and balance in the nervous system and produce smooth, harmonious heart rhythms. But these harmonious and coherent rhythms did more than reduce stress; they actually enhanced people's ability to clearly perceive the world around them. In order to be able to study these positive effects further, we taught our research subjects techniques that enabled them to generate a state of inner balance and harmony at will in the laboratory. [9, 16, 17] These techniques form the core of the HeartMath Solution.

The techniques that you'll learn in this book have been tested on hundreds of people from all walks of life. Once the heart rhythms of these research subjects came into balance and harmony, we found that they consistently reported increased mental clarity and intuition. When their heart rhythms shifted, they gained new control over their perceptions; and by gaining control over their perceptions, they were able to reduce stress and increase their effectiveness.

As they continued to practice these techniques in their daily lives, they reported increased creativity, enhanced communication with others, and a richer emotional experience of the textures of life. They also found that in this more balanced and coherent state, their perception of problems or difficult situations often widened enough that new perspectives and solutions emerged.

After Institute of HeartMath's scientists had begun to get consistent results in the lab, they extended their experiments to the workplace. The subjects of these new studies were asked to apply HeartMath Solution techniques during stressful situations at work. The results showed that these subjects were able to generate the same harmonious heart rhythms and shifts in nervous system balance in the workplace as other subjects had in the lab. [17]

The long-term results were even more encouraging. As the workplace participants practiced activating balanced heart rhythms consistently in their daily lives, they began to report benefits that went beyond our expectations. They reported a greater capacity to sustain a positive perspective, balance their emotions, and access an intuitive flow day to day, even in the midst of challenges.

Their ability to sustain these changes was important. It suggested that participants were actually able to retrain their systems to operate in a state of greater harmonyphysically, mentally, and emotionally.

The tools of the HeartMath Solution had allowed these research subjects to experience positive emotions at will. Even beyond that, though, they had changed the tenor of participants' lives by enabling a consistent experience of positive emotions. Instead of constantly reacting to circumstances, these people were helped by heart intelligence to make coherent sense of their lives.

As science continues to discover how people can harness and direct the coherent power of the heart, it offers tremendous hope that society can shift from disorder and chaos to a new era of coherence and quality living for all.


References
Chapter 1: Beyond the BrainThe Intelligent Heart

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2. Saint-Exupry, A. de. The Little Prince. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1943; quote p. 70.
3. Schiefelbein, S. The powerful river. In: Poole, R., ed. The Incredible Machine. Washington, D.C.: The National Geographic Society, 1986.
4. Armour, J., and Ardell, J., eds. Neurocardiology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
5. LeDoux, J. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
6. Lacey, J., and Lacey, B. Some autonomiccentral nervous system interrelationships. In: Black, P., Physiological Correlates of Emotion. New York: Academic Press, 1970:205?227.
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11. Goleman, D. Emotional Intelligence. NY: Bantam Books, 1995; quote p. 47.
12. Gardner, H. Frames of Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
13. Mayer, J., and Salovey, P. Emotional intelligence. Applied and Preventive Psychology. 1995;4(3):197208.
14. Bar-On, R. The era of the EQ: Defining and assessing emotional intelligence. Presented at the 104th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Toronto, 1996.
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17. Tiller, W., McCraty, R., and Atkinson, M. Cardiac coherence: A new non-invasive measure of autonomic system order. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. 1996; 2(1):5265.