Physical fitness is measured by how fast our heart rate recovers after stress.

Many of you know that I love mountain biking and a good way for me to measure my fitness is through my heart rate recovery. Or how quickly I recover after a cycle or just after a hill climb. When I have had a break from mountain biking my recovery is typically longer on my first cycle. As I get fitter my recovery gets better, I use this indicator as a good way to measure my fitness.

This is a medical and fitness industry measure of choice too. Heart rate recovery is important as it helps us understand how our heart recovers after stress. Mountain biking or any form of exercise intentionally and safely adds stress to the body. This stress helps us maintain healthy muscles and lungs and cardiovascular (heart and blood vessels) health. You can read more about heart rate recovery here.

I often joke that I clear the cobwebs in my heart and lungs when I first go mountain biking after a hiatus. Because it truly feels like the heart muscles get ‘stretched’ to a greater level and oxygen reaches parts of the lungs that are, in my opinion, underutilised. Because we are mostly shallow breathing when not exercising.

If heart rate recovery is a measure of physical fitness, for me self-regulation is a measure of our cognitive fitness.

What is self-regulation?

Self-regulation is our ability to regain/maintain homeostasis. Homeostasis is when our brain and body are in balance. Stress is when our body and brain are NOT in balance. For example, if you are driving on the road and someone cuts you off (a ‘threat’), you get upset, stressed, causing you to have a stress response. You swerve, honk and/or shout then keep going. Your brain and body are temporarily out of balance but after a short while (hopefully) you rebalance and your body is back in homeostasis. BUT if you are still stressed after reaching your destination, you are not yet in homeostasis. And prolonged stress causes cortisol to increase. But this for another article.

What is cognitive fitness? I define cognitive fitness as our ability to regain access to our higher thinking after experiencing stress.

In the example above, in the former, our self-regulation is quicker. In the latter, we require more time to self-regulate. When we can self-regulate faster, we have better access to our cognition or higher thinking and hence better cognitive fitness. If we need more time to recover from a ‘threat’, then we have less access to our higher thinking and therefore have lower cognitive fitness. Of course, the context of the ‘threat’ matters. For this article, my context is day-to-day ‘threats’ or stressors. And we ALL deal with our own stressors daily. How fast we recover from them is what I call cognitive fitness.

Another example is Will Smith’s ‘slap’ at the 2022 Oscars. Smith’s reaction to a perceived ‘threat’ to his wife. I believe he displayed self-regulation but only after a very international display of bad behaviour. His emotional apology later showed that he realised the weight of his behaviour. But his stress response was so high that it translated to violence in the moment.

From a neuroscience stance, he was in a full threat response with little or no access to his higher thinking. Whether a perceived or actual ‘threat’, in that moment, Smith was unable to choose a better response. I cannot speak about his general self-regulation as I don’t know him. But he may be ruminating on his action for a while. As will others there that night.

In a recent Neuroleadership Institute webinar I attended; research showed that 40% of people who witnessed questionable behaviour wasted two weeks ruminating over the incident. Such a waste of valuable cognitive capacity!

And like any fitness, cognitive fitness is a muscle and we can practise skills that can enhance our self-regulation. Some skills to re-engage our cognition are:

1. Pausing on demand

2. Breathing

3. Stepping away from the ‘threat’ (where applicable) and returning after homeostasis

With increasing global uncertainty, our physical and cognitive fitness are critical in helping us navigate these uncertainties. They are both muscles and can be strengthened with practise and you can measure your progress based on your recovery time.

So, how is your cognitive fitness?

As always, you can reach me at yoga@yoganesadurai.com

ps, I have dialled back my intermittent fasting to the usual 13 hours. My functional medicine doctor felt that 16 hours daily was too long to start with. Why? Because I need to increase my protein levels first to sustain the longer fasting time. I was getting too hungry! Not good.