In the post Trader Peak Per­for­mance and biofeed­back pro­grams we showed the Heart Rate Vari­abil­ity pat­terns cor­re­lated with lev­els of a) anx­i­ety or b) Peak Per­for­mance, “The Zone”. Biofeed­back sup­ports our emo­tional self-regulation: we can visu­ally track what is going on inside us and train our­selves to man­age our emo­tional state. On the left you have an exam­ple of my own per­for­mance dur­ing a 5-minute exper­i­ment 4 months ago. At the top, you see my name; at the bot­tom, the dura­tion of the ses­sion. Right axis, for top half, is Heart Rate. (This is only the half left of the screen in the program-the right half would give you more infor­ma­tion.) I have high­lighted sev­eral phases:

A: you can see long waves fol­low­ing a smooth rhythm-that is the phys­i­o­log­i­cal “The Zone”, where I can per­form at max­i­mum level. I was using breath­ing and visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques that are some­times called “The Men­tal Game” in ath­let­ics and sports.

B: I stressed myself. How? well, maybe think­ing of a pre­vi­ous boss, or some bad moment in my life. You see that the “waves” dis­ap­pear, and nar­row erratic pat­terns appear instead.

C: I quickly go back into “The Zone”, using a breath­ing and visu­al­iza­tion tech­nique that works for me. There are many techniques-the virtue of real time visual feed­back is that we can find what works for us. The more we train, the bet­ter we get at it.

D: the bot­tom half is show­ing the cumu­la­tive score, and whether I fall inside “The Zone”. The line goes down in the mid­dle because it reflects my anx­i­ety dur­ing phase B.

The biofeed­back pro­gram I used is emWave‚ PC Stress Relief (there is also a hand­held device called emWave PSR). It con­tains sev­eral short “videogames” where you have to learn to relax at will in order to suc­ceed. The graph above shows the mon­i­tor option-where you can see your Heart Rate and Heart Rate Vari­abil­ity real-time.

Enjoy,

Alvaro

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