Spirit

In addition to being a vital force within the body, the spirit is the essence of who you are as an individual and, collectively, as a team, organisation, family, or community. This greatly impacts how you live, act, and treat others.

But how can you tell if you are spiritually healthy or how much “spirit” you have? Most spiritual assessments involve perception-based surveys or questions about whether or not someone has faith, involvement in a religious community, spiritual practices, or the level of spiritual factors such as gratitude, love, peace, and hope. These are helpful, but what if there were a way to measure the physiology of the spirit and how it affects your body’s resources?

To many people, the spirit seems abstract and mysterious. However, there is a way to see the impact of the relationship between the spirit and the body.

The autonomic nervous system manages important functions—such as heartbeat, blood pressure, breathing, and digestion—that you do not regularly control using conscious thought. Your nervous system is always active to help your body adjust to life’s internal and external demands.​

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) operates by receiving information from the environment and other parts of the body. Within the system, there are the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. The sympathetic and parasympathetic systems tend to have opposing actions in which one system will stimulate a response while the other will inhibit it. ¹

In medicine, we break this into two parts: the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.

• Our sympathetic nervous system is our “fight or flight” response. You know this as the sweaty palms, heart racing, stomach-churning feeling you get right before a big presentation or the quick-as-a-dime reflex you have to jump out of the way of an approaching car.
• Our parasympathetic nervous system is our “rest and digest” response. This part of the nervous system allows us to relax, sleep and digest our food.

These two systems work in conjunction to manage the body’s responses depending on the situation and need. If, for example, you face a threat and need to flee, the sympathetic system will quickly mobilise your body to take action. Once the danger has passed, the parasympathetic system will start to ease these responses, slowly returning your body to its normal resting state and helping you recover from the experience.​

Heart rate variability (HRV) is a reliable index of autonomic function and a window to understanding the physiology of the soul. HRV is a measure of the amount of change or variability between heartbeats. This seems counterintuitive. Most people think the heart regularly beats at the same interval between beats. However, the heart slows down when you exhale and speeds up when you inhale. The heart constantly changes in conjunction with other systems to help your body adjust to different stress levels and demands.

So what do these changes between heartbeats have to do with health, spirit, and performance? It turns out that when the variability between heartbeats is chronically low, people tend to clinically be exhausted and are at greater risk of experiencing burnout, illness, and injuries. On the other hand, high HRV is a sign of increased energy, adaptability, resilience, and overall capacity for health and performance.

So the level and quality of HRV are reflected in one’s spirit and body resources. When long-term HRV is low, it can be a sign that the spirit is weary, downcast, and disheartened. Someone with long-term high HRV tends to be rich in spirit, energised, enthusiastic, and determined when faced with adversity. 

I believe that regulating the autonomic nervous system and maintaining a high HRV is important to strengthen life energy and spirit.