Harriet Griffey

I am sitting in an apartment in Paris with a clip on my earlobe, watching a trace of my heart rhythm on the screen of a laptop, and the doctor has just told me to deduct seven from 1,533 and then keep going. It is all in the interests of reducing my stress levels, but it feels as though it is going to put them through the roof: mental arithmetic has never been my strong subject, and I am panicking. Fear not, says Dr David Servan-Schreiber: his technique, something called heart coherence, really does work. What is more, it has no side-effects and it will make me feel in control of my stress. In fact, he goes on, it is positively insane that something so effective isn’t more mainstream. But then again, his book, Healing without Freud or Prozac, has sold more than a million copies worldwide, so the word is spreading fast.

The heart coherence software isn’t measuring my heart rate per se, it is measuring the variation in the rhythm of my heart rate, which alternates between what is referred to as chaos and coherence: the aim being to learn how to keep the heart in a state of coherence.

“OK, not bad,” says Servan-Schreiber. Despite my fears I realise that by concentrating really hard I can relax and focus. When I look at the trace again, my heart coherence has improved and it is immensely reassuring to discover that I can learn to influence my heart’s rhythms, and be able to relate what I see on the screen with how I feel, and remember that feeling as a future reference point.

“The more training we have in using this technique, the easier it becomes,” says Servan-Schreiber. It seems that we are actually built to manage stress, because of the two aspects of our nervous system — the sympathetic nervous system that works as an accelerator, releasing hormones necessary for “fight or flight” and the parasympathetic, which acts as a brake, releasing calming hormones that promote relaxation. The body’s ability to manage this fluctuation is key to both good mental and physical health which has long been known but, crucially, is now easier to,learn with a simple technique like heart coherence.

But what led Servan-Schreiber, with his medical training, more than 90 published research papers, and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, to look beyond the conventional wisdoms of his professional and clinical practice? It was in part his work with Doctors Without Borders where his experience with traumatised refugees in places such as Tajikistan and Kosovo began to influence his ideas.

“I saw things that seemed to work, but which were very puzzling to me as a western physician and scientist, then I looked in the literature to see if there was anything about it. And what stunned me was to discover that there existed natural methods of treatment, documented in the scientific literature, and when I tried them with patients I found that not only did they work, but they often worked better than conventional treatment.’’

One of these natural methods of treatment Servan-Schreiber came across was EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing), where the stimulation of eye movements while awake, that are similar to the Rem (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep during which the brain processes material, helps the brain connect and process remnants of traumatic experience. It is particularly useful in cases of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), where the “knowing” brain seems to disconnect from the “feeling” brain in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the experience, leaving the trauma unprocessed and unresolved. “It is insane that it’s not mainstream,” says Servan-Schreiber again, with an expression of exasperation, “especially when the eye movements of EMDR seem to accelerate the natural recovery from psychological trauma.”

“I started to integrate these natural methods of treatment into my practice, and realised that they worked so incredibly well it was insane that nobody would talk about it, and for a while I concentrated on trying to push this through the medical community. I did research, I published articles in the scientific literature, but after a while I thought the way to make things move at all is to release this information to the general public so that people can start using it for themselves. Which is why I wrote the book.’’ — The Guardian