The Power of Your Own Heart

These are stressful times and you know how tough it is these days keeping up with all that you have going on. Doc Childre, founder of the Institute of HeartMath, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, recognized a critical need back in the early 1990s for strategies to help people deal with their increasing stress. He and others made the remarkable discovery that the human heart possesses a vast intelligence and wisdom capable of guiding each of us to healthier and more productive lives.

Today, IHM is at the forefront of a global effort to bring heart-based living to people in every corner of our planet. As you and people around the world learn to connect with the power of your hearts and achieve personal coherence, we all can work together to transfer that coherence to those around us, our communities and countries. One day we will achieve global coherence, and it begins with you.

The institute’s long and extensive clinical, classroom and workplace research into heart-brain interaction, emotional physiology and how and why we learn and perform has led to cutting-edge technology and programs utilized in more than 50 countries across five continents.

IHM’s emotional-management and heart-coherence tools and techniques are practiced daily across a wide spectrum of societies in the U.S. and abroad. Our scientifically researched and tested learning and training programs have proven effective in the education sector with at-risk, lower-achieving and gifted students and teachers and administrators. Among the numerous benefits realized by individuals, schools, police departments, hospitals, corporations and other entities that have turned to HeartMath programs over the years, are stress reduction, lower blood pressure and decreased employee dissatisfaction and burnout.

We would like you to join with us in a HeartMath adventure through these pages, which we believe will enlighten, energize and inspire you as you learn about the wondrous capacity of your intelligent heart and allow it to guide you for the rest of your life to a state of health, happiness and productivity that has always been within your reach.

The Science in HeartMath

The Rhythm of the Heart – The very core of HeartMath’s findings regarding the ability of human beings to improve their lives emotionally, physically and mentally is what is known as "heart-rhythm coherence." In simple terms, your heart is coherent when your heart-rhythm patterns are smooth and balanced such as might be seen in an electrocardiogram. An incoherent heart is marked by jagged, disordered or irregular heart-rhythm patterns. When you are in a coherent state, you are more energetic, less susceptible to sickness and disease and able to perform your daily affairs more effectively and with greater clarity and ease.

Through applied science, Doc Childre and IHM researchers made two key discoveries early on:

1. The stresses of modern life as well as our emotions – from anxiety and anger to love and caring – directly influence the coherence or incoherence of our heart rhythms. For example, when you are feeling anger, typically, an irregular heart-rhythm pattern will be displayed on a heart-rhythm monitor or other measuring device.
2. You can influence the quality of your heart rhythms by intentionally and sincerely focusing on positive feelings. IHM scientific studies have shown conclusively, for example, that if you are feeling anger, then shift your focus to sincere appreciation such as for the friendship or love of another person, you can quickly change your irregular heart-rhythm patterns into smooth and balanced patterns.

HeartMath Today … For You!

We’ve developed simple, easy-to-use tools and techniques for you to apply to your daily regimen, spiritual practice or self-help program. HeartMath is about you and connecting with the intelligence of your own heart to help shape a healthier, happier you.

The Institute of HeartMath’s early discoveries led to the development of these tools and techniques, along with learning and training programs and technology that comprise the HeartMath System for heart-based living. Today we teach this system to people of all ages around the world, providing them with technology to help guide them in transforming not only their own lives, but the lives of those around them and, ultimately, our planet.

Tens of thousands of children and adults from North and South America to Africa and Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia have used the HeartMath System to tap into the vastness of their hearts’ intelligence and experience life-changing results. Doctors, nurses, therapists, sports figures and leaders in education, business and religious organizations offer high praise to HeartMath’s award-winning, scientifically tested and proven technology, the emWave PC Stress Relief System, emWave Mac and emWave^® Personal Stress Reliever.

Three Online Tools Especially For You!

On the upper left-side of For You! you’ll find three tools for heart-based living that we’re excited about and that can benefit you and the world around us: the Personal Tracker™, Stress and Well-Being Survey™; and Community Tracker™. All that’s required is for you to register. It’s free, and you’ll have full access to each of these innovative online tools.

• Personal Trackers™: In Survey 1 of your Personal Tracker, you can follow over time your Five Aspects of Well-Being: Physical Vitality, Emotional Vitality, Social Connectedness, Spiritual Connectedness and Overall Well-being. This amazing tool will track your last 20 sessions and report your trend with graphs. It will compare your last session with the average scores of all your previous sessions and then lets you see your progress visually. In Survey 2, you can hone your skills with the emWave^® PSR and watch the change in your performance and state of well-being as you score. Go to Personal Tracker.

• Personal Trackers™ is an important extension of the affordable and powerful biofeedback technology that IHM has developed during its 19 years of scientific research. Even if you don’t have an emWave now, you can still use Survey 1 of the Personal Trackers.

  "A change of heart changes everything."

  
  
• Community Tracker™: Think of Community Tracker as a stethoscope for the heart of the community and how it is feeling in real time – over the previous 24 hours – and see how you compare to the community. You also can see where other survey takers live – in your city, state or country – and you can look at the trends of the community over various time periods. Go to Community Tracker.
• Stress and Well-Being Survey™: In this scientific survey, based on 19 years of research, you’ll learn quickly and precisely how stressed you are – at work, home and in your relationships. Our survey takes a close look at your adaptability to events and situations in your life and your resilience – the ability to manage stress – over the long term.
  
  The survey is a thorough assessment tool for your state of mind and heart, so you’ll know exactly when to use HeartMath tools to re-energize and rebalance your heart, mind and emotions. Use it as often as you feel you need to assess yourself, especially during key situations and periods in your life. A complete scoring system gives your results in clear, in-depth visual graphs. Then, we’ll make some recommendations based on your scores. You can even see how your scores compare to others who’ve also taken the survey. Go to Stress Well-Being Survey.

Free Services For You!

The tools mentioned above are a few examples of the many fine, free services that are only a click away to help you get started on improving your life in countless ways, so you can experience the joy and fulfillment of heart-based living. We hope you, your family, friends, co-workers or clients take advantage of these free services because you’re the reason for them and HeartMath.

You may find something in our Solutions for Stress pages that’s exactly what you’ve been searching for: how to get a good night’s rest – without pills; overcoming fatigue – in an easy and natural way; how to build a loving and lasting relationship – sincerely, with no artificiality; or practical, easy methods for releasing anger – in the moment and over the long term. If any of these sound like something you’re interested in, for yourself or someone else, please don’t hesitate to click the following link: Free Services. You’ll find all sorts of other information there, too: publications, tools, the HeartMath Report, HeartQuotes^® and much more – gifts from the people at HeartMath just for you!

IHM Technology and Products For You!

Our scientifically developed and tested products help people in all walks of life transform stress, manage emotions and get in touch with their heart selves so they can think more clearly, perform better and feel more balanced, energized and in control of their lives.

IHM’s emWave^® technology, incorporating 19 years of scientific research, is used by people around the world, personally and professionally, to manage stress and achieve personal coherence.

• The emWave Personal Stress Reliever: "Pocket-sized biofeedback device for you" Use your emWave PSR, about the size of a cell phone, anywhere to help you learn to achieve and sustain coherence and transform the negative effects of stress and anxiety into energy and optimal performance. The PSR shows you when your stress is on the rise, and then, using HeartMath’s easily learned tools and techniques, keeps you posted as you quickly lower it – within minutes. For more information go to my emWave PSR site or to purchase go to emWave PSR.
• The emWave PC/Mac Stress Relief System: "State-of-the-art Stress Relief for you" The emWave PC/Mac turns your computer into a self-contained heart-rhythm-coherence monitor and manager. You’ll see how emotions affect your heart rhythms and discover which emotions you can activate to prevent, manage and reverse the negative effects of stress, anxiety, anger and other destructive emotions. You’ll boost your energy and improve your overall well-being. For more information, go to emWave PC site or to purchase, go to emWave PC / emWave Mac.

For Students: If you’re a student, parent of a student or someone who cares about the education of young people, you need to know about TestEdge^®. Scientifically developed and based on 19 years of research into the physiology of learning, TestEdge gets straight to the heart of what makes you learn and teaches you emotional refocusing tools to get you up to speed and proficiency on tests, papers and homework, and guides toward a self-generated love of learning and school.

Students, TestEdge will help you improve your focus, comprehension, memory recall, study habits and, perhaps most important in today’s increasingly competitive climate, your ability to take tests: Whether it’s a pop quiz or a high-stakes exam, TestEdge can help you raise your scores. In tandem with its heart-based academic approach, TestEdge is uniquely designed to help school-age youth get in touch with their hearts’ intelligence and take responsibility for and transform their attitudes and behaviors.

TestEdge programs for the classroom are helping teachers for years to better manage their students, prepare and conduct more meaningful lessons and experience the satisfaction and rewards that led them into this noble profession. Go to TestEdge.

IHM’s HeartSmarts™ social and emotional intelligence program, more than a decade in development, is helping students in many parts of the country to manage stress, improve academic motivation and focus, and reduce conflict – in school and at home. Go to HeartSmarts^®.

For Teachers and Those Who Care About Them: HeartMath understands that you can use all the help you can get in today’s schools and classrooms. That’s why, if you’re a teacher or someone who cares about teachers and education, you should know about the Resilient Educator^® and the Qualified Instructor Program^®.

• The Resilient Educator, praised by educators for its new ideas and solid foundation in neuroscience, can help you cope more effectively with stress. This training program helps boost teacher performance, improve school relationships, strengthen resiliency and rekindle educators’ motivation and energy. Go to Resilient Educator.
• The Qualified Instructor Program, a train-the-trainer program, goes a step beyond by teaching and licensing professional trainers, educators and consultants to provide HeartMath skills to teachers, administrators and other school staff. These trainers are licensed to provide Institute of HeartMath workshops within educational settings in a cost-effective way. Go to Qualified Instructor Program.

Books, CD’s and More … For You!

The Institute of HeartMath has adapted a broad range of many of its most important written works online for your convenience. Now, HeartMath’s many years of research into stress, the intelligence and marvelous capacity and wisdom of the heart, emotional management and much more, along with its internationally acclaimed tools and techniques to help people manage their health and well-being, can be accessed right from your home computer. Go to e-Books.

From managing stress and anxiety to helping children build core values and companies build strong, healthy, caring organizations or simply improving your attitude and confidence on the golf course, you’ll find a treasure trove of information, surprising revelations and helpful tips among HeartMath’s many insightful books, e-Books, e-Booklets, software and audio/media products. Go to the HeartMath Store.

Here’s a small sampling:

• Teen Self Discovery: Helping Teens Find Balance, Security & Esteem (book, e-Book): If you are a teen or someone who cares about teens, Teen Self Discovery can help you understand teen stress, and it gives you simple solutions for managing it. Less stress means healthy, positive choices. Go to Teen Self Discovery.
• The Appreciative Heart (e-booklet): This is one of HeartMath’s numerous scientific monographs reflecting our 19 years of cutting-edge research. This concise overview shows you the physiological correlates of positive emotions and the scientific underpinnings of two core HeartMath techniques that can help you understand and experience heart-based living. Go to The Appreciative Heart.
• A Practitioners Guide, Applications of Using the emWave^® PC/Mac* Stress Relief System (e-Booklet, booklet): This guide offers health practitioners new tools for stress reduction and emotional management, including how to evaluate clients and explain the emWave^® PC/Mac system to them. Go to A Practioner’s Guide.
• Transforming Stress (book, e-Booklet, audio program): This first of four works in the Transforming series will teach you to engage the power of your heart to help change old stress-producing habit patterns and how to boost your emotional power, regenerate your emotions and replenish emotional reserves. Go to Transforming Stress.
• Solving Sleeplessness (MP3 audio file): Learn how to overcome sleeplessness through the HeartMath System, including the Heart Lock-In^® technique, a powerful, nonpharmaceutical solution to help you start getting the uninterrupted, refreshing sleep you need, more often. Go to Solving Sleeplessness.
• Improving Relationships (MP3 audio file): Learn the Authentic Communication tool along with heart discernment, nonjudgment and balancing your emotions so you can begin building lasting relationships. Go to Improving Relationships.

HeartMath Tomorrow

As HeartMath teaches its science-based, proven approaches to heart-based living today, our researchers, collaborating with professionals, experts and consultants in a broad range of disciplines already have the vistas of tomorrow in sight. They’re exploring outside the boundaries of our common knowledge and perceptions about the relationship between our inner hearts and the world and universe around us.

Through scientific investigation, IHM has shown that the human heart is a wellspring of intuitive capacity and actually receives intuitive information before the brain, and we want to learn more about this exciting field of study to help you utilize this hidden region of the "heart brain."

Equally exciting among the groundbreaking projects and research being conducted at HeartMath facilities around the world is the Global Coherence Monitoring System (GCMS). IHM and internationally renowned astrophysicist and nuclear scientist Elizabeth Rauscher are partnering to build an elaborate monitoring system to measure and explore fluctuations in the magnetic fields generated by the earth and ionosphere. Researchers hope to determine whether the earth’s field is influenced by or reflected in human heart-rhythm patterns or brain activity and whether this field can signal earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other planetary events. Go to Global Coherence Monitoring System.

The GCMS is part of the larger Global Coherence Initiative in which we envision you and millions of others around the world using the power and intelligence of your hearts to achieve personal coherence and become a catalyst for an international shift toward healing the earth. We know people like you already are leading the way toward global coherence – the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual well-being of the greater community of human beings acting in concert with their own hearts, each other and nation to nation in harmony with our living planet. Go to Global Coherence Initiative.

Fundraising … For You and Everyone!

We live in a time of great planetary change in which a global shift in personal and collective attitudes is taking place. Important decisions are being made each day that affect the future health of our planet. These decisions are being made not only by world leaders, but also by each individual as we decide every day how to conduct our lives. Each of us decides through our actions whether we will be participants in the healing of our world, not only for distant generations, but of more immediate importance, for tomorrow’s. Go to Your Dollars at Work.

The Institute of HeartMath is an active and committed participant in this quest, but we rely on your donations for continuing our research and development into new and better methods of fostering heart-based living in which people connect with the guidance and intelligence of their hearts to achieve personal and global coherence. Your contribution will be used to support our continued breakthrough research, communicate the life-improving benefits of heart-based living, create and expand our education programs and develop new programs to effect positive change in the lives of people around the world. Go to Make a Gift.

The Heart-Based Education Sponsorship Fund for Students and Teachers: IHM launched this fund in summer 2007. Your financial contributions to the fund will help the Institute of HeartMath, a nonprofit 501 (c) (3) organization, put our life-changing educational programs such as TestEdge^® and the Resilient Educator^® and our scientifically developed and tested technology into the hands of students and teachers who otherwise would not have access to them. Students will learn how positive emotions can improve learning and teachers will be better equipped to promote positive classroom and social behavior. Teachers not only will be armed with highly effective tools to help students succeed, but they’ll also gain greater confidence and inspiration themselves. Go to Heart-Based Education Sponsorship Fund.

The HeartMath Military Service Appreciation Fund: IHM recognizes the service and sacrifice our military has made for their country and the tremendous hardships and psychological problems faced by troops returning from combat. There are a growing number of requests for HeartMath tools and technologies from our already overextended military and Veterans Administration facilities.

IHM launched the HeartMath Military Service Appreciation Fund in fall 2007 so you and all of us could extend the care for them they have shown for their country. HeartMath staff who have worked with doctors, psychologists, physical therapists and clinicians in a number of VA and military facilities have reported wonderful results using IHM tools and techniques and the emWave^® PSR and emWave^® PC/Mac. Soldiers have regained emotional balance, physiological functioning and greater ease transitioning back into civilian life.

With your generous donations, a trained staff person can introduce HeartMath tools and emWave technology to a veteran, who can then use these personally and perhaps share them with families and others. Troops can even use them before deployment to develop emotional resiliency skills and help prevent post-traumatic stress syndrome, anxiety and depression. Learn more at HeartMath Military Service Appreciation Fund.

Other Ways You Can Give: IHM has a planned giving program for charitable annuities, trusts, endowments or naming IHM as a beneficiary in your will. You may also choose to make a contribution on behalf of someone who is doing good work or in memory of a loved one. Go to Planned Giving.

Membership For You!

We invite you to become a member of the Institute of HeartMath and begin connecting with the wisdom and intelligence of your heart. Stay informed about the exciting global shift taking place today and join people around the world as we learn to use the power of the heart to uplift ourselves, each other and our planet. Go to Membership.

Here are some of the many benefits you’ll receive when you become a member:

• Three Exclusive Webinars^†: During each of these webinars you’ll receive in-depth instruction and new information not available anywhere else on the use of one of HeartMath’s life-changing tools and techniques, research, personal and global coherence and more.
• My Member Page: A place where members can go to access and download members only archived Webinars: The Science of Intuition: Developing Yours and How Practicing Coherence Enhances Cognitive Functions and Helps Offset Cognitive Decline. We’ll soon be adding more features to the My Member Page.
• Newsletter Subscription: Stay current on major activities at the Institute of HeartMath, news on our latest scientific research, tips in stress reduction and practices in heart-based living. We’ll tell you about new free services, programs and products, relate stories about HeartMath in schools, social services, personal lives and more. (The newsletter is published online every other month.)
• Three MicroTrainings:^† In each MicroTraining, you’ll be instructed in the use of a HeartMath tool or technique and how to apply it in your everyday life to improve personal performance, health and overall well-being.
• Special Discounts: Members will receive substantial product discounts at various times throughout the year on HeartMath books, software technology, CDs, published learning programs and more.
• The Adventure Begins Webinar^†: We’ll jumpstart your experience with the HeartMath community by introducing you to our mission of establishing heart-based living, the tools and techniques of the HeartMath System and giving you an overview our programs, research, the Global Coherence Initiative and much more.
• Your membership will help support our research in emotional physiology, heart–brain interactions, educational and workplace intervention studies, treatment outcome studies in clinical populations, heart-rate variability and autonomic function, emotional energetics and intuition.
  
  † Webinars, MicroTrainings and Orientation Classes are given over the telephone and Internet.

Click to learn more or become a member now.