Heart Breath Mind: Conquer Stress, Build Resilience, and Perform at Your Peak

To start, to emphasize the importance of this book for me, I will start by saying I have NEVER written a single review for anything or any experience! This will be long.I am someone who since an early age has focused on trying to enjoy my journey in life by maximizing things that bring me joy while minimizing things that cause me physical and emotional pain.I lead a healthy and active life but now in my mid-50s have become most interested in all things related to anti-aging and increasing my healthspan for as long as possible. This includes exercise, nutrition, my immune system, sleep and mindfulness/breathing.I purchased an Oura ring 3 years ago to monitor and store my health data while focusing on my sleep. Over those 3 years of focusing on my sleepscore and all the data in the Oura ring I was successful in increasing all the metrics through changes in my approach to Mindfulness, Immune system, Nutrition and Exercise. In October of last year I realized that the only metric that did not change was my HRV. As a data analytics person when you go to all these changes in lifestyle over the three year period and see all metrics change but one, it makes an analytics freak excited.I spent the end of 2022 trying to learn everything I could about HRV and understand what I was missing. The message was breathing but I was already meditating daily and using a respiratory breathing device to help with lung capacity and diaphramtic breathing. It was only when I found this book that I was able to find the missing puzzle piece. In only two months I have been able to raise my HRV baseline from the highs 20s to the mid 50s and this is before I start the biofeedback training. I have purchased multiple books and the audio book and believe everyone should read the book to understand the world of pyschophysiology from the easy to understand explanations Dr Lagos is able to present. HRV has been a focus for performance based athletes and entertainers but this is critical for anyone looking for more health and happiness in a world where stress is a major force behind the unhappiness.I may never write another review because I don't think anything can be as important to an individual as this book! Thanks Dr Lagos.

I first heard about Dr. Leah Lagos from interviews and podcasts with elite performers like Tim Ferris, Josh Waitzkin, and Adam Robinson to name a few superstars. They all mentioned how phenomenal Dr. Lagos was to work with and her pioneering work in the field of heart rate variability biofeedback. I have suffered with awful sleep quality for years and have heard that focusing on HRV could help me sleep better so I gave it a try.Best decision ever! This is a summary of her comprehensive ten week program. You learn about the balance between our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system (responsible for our fight-or-flight response) and tons of more research on the benefits of controlled breathing. I'm grateful Dr. Lagos wrote the book and shared her research for those who cannot participate in her program live.Within weeks, I was falling asleep faster and staying asleep. I've tried exercise, change in diet, meditation and yoga - none of it worked until I followed her suggestions for ten weeks of focused and controlled breath work. While parts can get technical, I felt it was incredibly easy to read and loved her writing style throughout. Highly recommend!

The phrase "follow your heart" takes on a whole new meaning after reading Dr. Lagos's book Heart, Breath, Mind: Train Your Heart to Conquer Stress and Achieve Success. In her revolutionary program, Dr. Lagos informs us that the heart sends far more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. This flow of information helps drive our decision making, moderates impulsivity, and controls emotions. These critical areas affect our work as well as personal relationships and are functions that we all as humans, could use help with. Dr. Lagos provides that guidance during her 10 week program.

Heard Dr. Lagos on the Elite HRV podcast and purchased her book right after listening to her two-part interview. As a quantified-self/bio-hacker, I was intrigued to see how resonance breathing could benefit my heart rate variability. The book is a 10 week read (because there are weekly exercises). I read a chapter every Sunday night then practiced resonance breathing twice a day for 20 minutes.I just completed all ten weeks and I'm pleasantly surprised. I was able to raise my HRV, but more than that, I've gained an ability to shift my mind-state on demand using techniques from the book. Highly recommend this book to anyone looking for an introduction to resonance breathing.

There are many books and advice on how to reduce stress, but I never came across a technique that teaches you how to read your body to know its level of stress. This book teaches you to understand your body, and how to bring it to an optimal level where you will not only reduce stress but will achieve optimal performance. The best $20 investment in your health and life.

I have been interested for sometime in this HRV training that Dr.Lagos does.Praise for her work has come from some of the brightest minds in the world of human performance.Glad to see that it is now available to those who might not be able to make an in office appointment.

I bought this book to go along with the Elite HRV app. The authors 10-week program is free on the Elite HRV app and is totally doable. Heart, Breath, Mind is a much needed book for our times.

Typically this kind of books are filled with not so useful information just to extend the length (I guess authors get paid by pages?), but this book takes the cake. It has so many useless stories, keeps repeating the same thing over and over before actually getting to the useful information. I wish authors would care more about condensing the information and saving their readers time rather than the length of the book.If it werent because of the above the book would be great, even with all the fillers it's worth reading, just speed-read until you get to the useful parts.

If you want to understand the science and concepts about heart rate variability (HRV), the autonomic nervous system and how tuning into these areas can help you sleep and regulate your emotions better, then, without a doubt, Dr Leah's book lays it out in the most comprehensive and readable way I have come across. It is not just a good read but the most practical aid to getting started to find your resonant breathing frequency and feeling amazing benefits from day one.I am on week two exercises now and the first week has been amazing. I have been using Elite HRV biofeedback app for quite a while now so the getting started was relatively easy for me. I do a lot of yoga and meditation so I am used to focussing on my breathing. Resonant breathing for 20 minutes at a frequency that works for you supercharges your system in a way that yoga and meditation have not quite achieved for me. In fact, after 20 minutes of resonant breathing followed by yoga, I feel on a different level and in a beautiful state of flow for the rest of the day. After the first few days, I was having the most beautiful, restful sleep. I have attached some of my Elite HRV morning readiness scores to show the results.I think that understanding more about resonant breathing and how it affects your HRV enables you to work bottom-up from your body to your brain to bring about amazingly fast changes to your emotional state. This book and tools like the Elite HRV app are a major game-changer for making the unconscious conscious and providing major insights into managing your health.

This book has had a huge impact on me. I have been tracking my heart rate variability for several years now, but I first came across resonance breathing and the work of Dr. Lagos through Tim Ferriss, who on his podcast mentioned the impact it has had on his recovery journey from childhood trauma. While I was not trying to address any trauma myself, 2020 had definitely been a difficult year, and for the first time in my adult life, I experienced something I’d describe as anxiety. So I was eager to give HRV biofeedback training a go and picked up Dr. Lagos's book.Our heart is just like any other muscle in that it has a muscle memory that can be trained. The ten-week program outlined by Lagos in her book aims at exactly this, using our breath to help our heart unlearn bad patterns, ingrained through trauma, anxiety, or just bad breathing habits, and relearn patterns that make our heart more responsive and resilient. In doing so, we also address the balance between our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, which are responsible for fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest respectively. For many of us, this balance has shifted far too much to the sympathetic side.I followed the 10-week program through its entirety, practicing resonance breathing twice a day for 20 minutes. According to Lagos, completing the program can have numerous and varied benefits, including: Less mind chatter and more control over your thoughts, decreased stress and anxiety, relieved medical conditions related to ANS dysfunction, getting better at connecting with positive emotions and triggering them, increased stamina, better emotional regulation and overall mood, and more empathy. And I was very impressed that the method lived up to the claims. With the exception of “relieve of medical conditions” (I didn’t have any concrete condition I was trying to address) and “increased stamina” (I wasn’t really active during that time in a way that would have allowed for me to really notice or quantify this), I can say that I feel like I have personally perceived all of the promised benefits.Overall, I’ve been feeling much better during and after completing the program outlined in the book. I’m planning to continue with resonance breathing, using it not just for stress relief, but also performance optimization, and the book has inspired me to dive much deeper into this topic in the future, and even combine it with some of my professional interests.

I’m halfway through the 10-day program in the book and I notice a huge difference in stress levels. I have already recommended the book to all my closest friends.

This book has been a real game changer for me. It has provided me with a very powerful tool that I can use to calm my nervous system down and enjoy life a lot more. It seems especially valuable for people who tend to get overstimulated easily in certain situations, e.g. highly sensitive persons.The core of the book is a 10 week program that aims at bolstering the reader’s heart rate variability by exercising breathing at her resonance frequency. Note that the breathing exercises need to be done twice 20 minutes a day, i.e. you need to invest 40 minutes a day for performing the exercises over a course of 10 weeks (and potentially thereafter). This is in my opinion the biggest obstacle one needs to overcome in this program.But it was absolutely worth it for me. After a few days already I noticed significant calming effects and a much more positive attitude. The effect was tremendous. It was like getting glasses for the first time and realizing that your perception has been suboptimal the entire time.Besides the daily breathing exercises the book provides the reader with various techniques that can be applied for example during or shortly after stressful situations or in preparation for a significant event such as a presentation or a competition. It even addresses things such as traumatic events one might have experienced in the past. These techniques have proven to be really valuable for me. They neither make you less sensitive nor are a panacea in all situations, but they provide you with efficient techniques that you can use to calm down and go through life with more equanimity and focus.I highly appreciated the calm and unagitated, yet empathic, illustrative and precise style that for me struck the right balance between theoretic background and practical applications. Many of the illustrative examples center on people who are regularly in the spotlight (athletes, CEOs, actors), but you can also relate to and derive benefits from them even if you don’t belong to this category of person, at least I could. A lot of boxes deal with commonly asked questions that might come up during the program.Here are some additional points I noticed during and after the program in case this is helpful for anyone.Belly breathing is an essential part of resonance breathing. As a big fan of Kelly Starrett’s mobility work I noticed that belly breathing became a lot easier after I had implemented some of what he calls the targeted or diaphragm gut smashing mobilizations. These exercises facilitated belly breathing enormously. They made resonance breathing a lot more pleasant as the resistance in my belly decreased significantly.I noticed that my resonance frequency seemed to shift over the course of the weeks. In the beginning, an inhale of 4 seconds and an exhale of 6 seconds produced the largest effect. However, in week 9 or 10, after noticing that resonance breathing did not produce as much of an effect any more, which I first attributed to other factors, I retried different resonance frequencies and noticed that a pattern of 4.4/6.6 was much more comfortable by then.After finishing the 10-week program I wondered how I could continue reaping the benefits from resonance breathing. It is recommended continuing practising at least five days a week. What I have done since is to practise resonance breathing while going for a walk. This seems to have several benefits. Number 1, this does not require me to free up extra time as walking is already a habit I practise on a daily basis. Second, it keeps me from sitting still on a chair, which I already do way too much. I have noticed that counting in my head and breathing at a rate that seems natural seems to work as well. At least, I feel effects similar to those I experience while sitting and using a timer.In short, this book has been extremely helpful for me, which is why I recommend it highly for anyone looking for advice for dealing with overarousal and related issues such as nervousness or anxiety.

A great book for everyone who breathes. Nice to see the power of breath appear, backed by science and clinical research. It is a practical and useful work without any mystical or spiritual distractions. Thank you dr. Lagos and thank you dr. Tyson for giving this wonderful branch of science some light.