The Lief App allows you to visualize the state of your body over time. On the top of the Lief app’s landing page, a scrollable timeline displays colored and patterned bars, each representing 5-minutes of your data. The data can tell a story about your day. Note: the following timeline's annotations are for illustrative purposes only, your data will be unique to you.
Your Lief categorizes your unique HRV range into quintiles:
Red = 0-20th percentile
Red/Yellow = 20th-40th percentile
Yellow/Green = 40th-60th percentile
Green = 60th-80th percentile
Blue = 80th-100th
The 5 color gradients represent your 5 personalized physiological stress "zones." The color zones/bars help you interpret whether your HRV is relatively lower or higher. You have access to real-time feedback, as well as historical data through your HRV bar graph. Lief learns more about you the more you wear it, so these zones become more accurate for your body, specifically, over time.
The timeline shown above in this article is a great snapshot of a normal day where HRV may be fluctuating based on what I was doing and experiencing. Let’s walk through what I was doing and what was happening in my mind and body.
Around 11am, there are a few 5-minute periods where my body experienced significant psycho-physiological stress– these happened earlier in the day while I was doing household chores and going up and down the stairs which naturally raised my heart rate and decreased my HRV.
For about an hour, I sat down and did some work on my computer and brought my HRV up to the green and blue zones. I was relaxed during this time and for some moments, I was in a reclined position which is indicated by the gray shaded bars above the color bars.
Just after 12pm, I took a mid-day walk that brought my HRV to the orange/red zone. During activity and exercise, our body naturally switches from parasympathetic into sympathetic nervous system dominance which is completely normal and necessary to help us power through these challenges. You’ll notice the cross-hatch pattern over the colored bars indicates that I was active during this time.
After my walk, my HRV recovered quickly back to the green and blue zone– illustrating a resilient nervous system! I hydrated which helped to increase my HRV even more and then had a working lunch where I felt relatively relaxed and focused for several hours.
Later in the afternoon around 3pm, I had some meetings and felt hypervigilant and spoke quickly, which brought me into the yellow/orange zones. Once the meeting was over, I did a 2-minute practice downtime dose and quickly recovered back to the blue/ green zones.
This timeline shares how our HRV can change throughout the day and illustrates how we can modulate our HRV in moments where it dips, using the downtime breathing practice and other wellness tools to bring ourselves back to a parasympathetic state.
Some days introduce noticeably more stress than normal. We may spend our days physically sitting down, but our mind may be preoccupied by thoughts and worries, and we stop paying attention to our body and breath. Here is an example of a day's data that indicates it's probably time to treat yourself to some rest and relaxation:
This was a late afternoon filled with running errands and rushing to complete tasks before their deadlines. Usually, we don't even realize this body state when it's present. Thankfully, the Lief does, and comes to the rescue with "autodoses" based on your training thresholds, which prompt you to complete Downtime breathing that aligns with your HRV biofeedback which is what led me back up to the yellow, green, and blue zones.
In addition to autodoses, we can do self-initiated practice and tap sessions to give us an extra boost throughout the day. For example:
In this instance, I increase my HRV +56 in 2 minutes simply by taking slow deep breaths and letting the Lief’s vibration guide my exhales for this downtime dose.
The story Lief tells us can reinforce to what we already know about our subjective experience. Other times, it may come as a surprise because we would never have noticed an interesting body state without Lief at our side. What story does Lief tell about you today?