Exaggerated heart rate oscillations during two meditation techniques

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Abstract

We report extremely prominent heart rate oscillations associated with slow breathing during specific traditional forms of Chinese Chi and Kundalini Yoga meditation techniques in healthy young adults. We applied both spectral analysis and a novel analytic technique based on the Hilbert transform to quantify these heart rate dynamics. The amplitude of these oscillations during meditation was significantly greater than in the pre-meditation control state and also in three non-meditation control groups: i) elite athletes during sleep, ii) healthy young adults during metronomic breathing, and iii) healthy young adults during spontaneous nocturnal breathing. This finding, along with the marked variability of the beat-to-beat heart rate dynamics during such profound meditative states, challenges the notion of meditation as only an autonomically quiescent state.

Introduction

There has been much interest in heart rate dynamics during a variety of physiological and pathological states. In addition, considerable attention has been focused on the potential health benefits of a variety of meditative, relaxation techniques and their possible effects on neuroautonomic function. Surprisingly, however, there is little information regarding the effects of meditation on beat-to-beat heart rate dynamics as an indirect “assay” of autonomic regulation [1], [2], [3]. Accordingly, we collected and analyzed continuous heart rate time series from two groups of healthy young adults before and during two well-known forms of meditation. We sought to determine: 1) whether there are any distinctive heart rate dynamics during these practices, and 2) whether such meditative states induce a quiescent (less variable) or active (more variable) pattern of autonomic response.

Section snippets

Subjects and meditation protocols

Two specific meditative techniques were studied: (i) Chinese Chi (or Qigong) meditation (as taught by Xin Yan) and (ii) Kundalini Yoga meditation (as taught by Yogi Bhajan).

The Chi meditators were all graduate and post-doctoral students. They were also relative novices in their practice of Chi meditation, most of them having begun their meditation practice about 1–3 months before this study. The Kundalini Yoga subjects were considered to be at an advanced level of meditation training. The

Results

Fig. 1 shows representative instantaneous heart rate plots for one Chi meditator and one Kundalini meditator. Two features stand out: (1) The extremely prominent heart rate oscillations for both subjects during meditation. Spectral analysis of these heart rate time series confirmed a peak in the range of 0.025–0.35 Hz for both groups of meditators. For example, Fig. 2 shows illustrative data from another Chi meditator with a spectral peak around 0.05 Hz. (2) The overall variability of the time

Discussion

The major and unexpected finding in this analysis of heart rate dynamics during these two forms of meditation in a small number of subjects was the presence of intermittent, extremely prominent oscillations in the 0.025–0.35 Hz band. For example, as shown in Fig. 1, the heart rate varied over a 30–35 beat/min range within 5 sec in some of the subjects. These oscillations, observed in both Chi and Kundalini practitioners, correlated with slow breathing. Of note, these oscillations were

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