One of the Most Powerful Things You Can Do for Your Health: Learning to Slow Your Heart Rate
And how we can help.
The health hack that costs zero dollars
I heard something recently from Bryan Johnson (the “Don’t Die” guy) that really stayed with me. He’s definitely out-the-gate — radical in the way he approaches his own protocols and processes — but if you listen carefully, there are pieces of what he’s doing that are actually quite simple, and achievable.
Bryan reckons that one of the most powerful things you can do for your health is to learn how to consciously lower your heart rate before bed so you can get a better night's sleep.
We tend to think about health in terms of what we add or what we take, track and optimise. But this points to something more fundamental that we can all pay attention to if we know what to look for: What state is your system in, moment to moment? Are you running slightly elevated all day, and do you know how to bring yourself back down?
Most people don’t. Not because they can’t, but because they’ve never really been shown how - through awareness and regulation.
When your heart rate is consistently elevated, even subtly, it’s often a sign that your system is running in a low-grade state of stress. Not necessarily panic or anxiety, but a kind of background activation that becomes so normal we stop noticing it. You wake up into it, you move through your day in it, and by the time evening comes, your system doesn’t really know how to come down. A higher resting heart rate is linked to increased stress on the cardiovascular system, poorer sleep, reduced recovery, and over time, greater risk of long-term health issues. But beyond the metrics, it’s also how it feels. It’s the sense of always being slightly on, wired and like you're a bit behind in your own life.
Most of us are trying to solve that with more doing but the ability to down-regulate — to genuinely bring the system into a slower, more coherent state — is something else entirely. It’s about softening, surrendering and slowing down.
These are skills that we practice at SOMM, particularly in the evening classes where we aren’t just “meditating” in a conceptual sense, but actively shifting the nervous system out of sympathetic dominance and into a more parasympathetic, restorative state. Our evening classes are important because they meet you at the exact point where most of us are still carrying the day. So instead of rolling straight from that into sleep (or into a glass of wine to try and soften it), we create a deliberate transition.
If you’re interested in the idea Brian Johnson speaks to, you can explore more of his work here: https://dontdie.com/
And if you want a place to actually practise slowing down, to feel it in your body rather than just understand it conceptually, that’s what we’re here for. Here’s the timetable to book an evening class like SOMM Exhale, Yoga Nidra, or SOMM Mediate.