Your Brain Score is a personalized metric that helps you understand how well your brain is functioning, including how it processes stress and adapts to challenges. This score provides insights into your cognitive health, guiding you toward targeted strategies for improvement.
EEG, or Electroencephalography, is a non-invasive technique used to measure the electrical activity in your brain. By placing small sensors on the scalp, EEG records brain wave patterns, providing valuable insights into brain function, including how it reacts to stress, focus, and relaxation. This data helps clinicians understand the health of your brain and create personalized plans to enhance cognitive performance.
HRV, or Heart Rate Variability, is a key measurement of your brain's ability to communicate effectively with your heart and lungs. When your body responds to stress, like the fire alarm analogy mentioned earlier, both your heart rate and breathing rate should increase in sync. If they don't, it may indicate that your brain is struggling to coordinate communication between these organs.This is where HRV comes into play: it reflects how well your brain is managing stress and ensuring proper function of your vital organs through the vagus nerve. Low HRV can lead to a variety of health risks, including heart disease, stroke, systemic inflammation, and cognitive decline.
Heart rate is a key indicator of how well the brain and nervous system are functioning. During stress, heart rate should rise, and after the stressor passes, it should decrease. If the brain struggles to regulate heart rate properly, it can signal nervous system exhaustion, which may lead to long-term health issues, including conditions like Alzheimer's or cancer. Monitoring heart rate patterns can help detect early imbalances, providing an opportunity for intervention and improvement in overall health.
The Respiratory Resilience Index measures how your respiration rate responds to stress and recovery. Under stress (like during a fire alarm), your respiration rate should naturally increase, and once the stressor is removed, it should slow down. An optimal respiration rate should be between 6 and 12 breaths per minute, with closer to 6 being ideal.
The graph tracks these fluctuations in response to various stressors. The ideal scenario is a rise in respiration rate during stress followed by a gradual decrease during recovery. If the rate does not decrease sufficiently, or if there's a reversal in the expected pattern, it can indicate an issue with the brain's ability to coordinate breathing properly. This can impact overall health, including the brain's ability to heal and adapt to stress.
Hand temperature is a critical measure of how well your brain can direct blood flow throughout your body. When in a survival state (due to stress or danger), the brain prioritizes sending blood to vital organs and muscles, pulling it away from the hands and feet. This is essential for quick physical response, like escaping a dangerous situation. However, when the brain is unable to restore blood flow back to the hands and feet after the stress subsides, it signals that the brain is stuck in survival mode. Consistently low hand temperature (below 85°F) can indicate chronic stress and might increase the risk of conditions like arthritis, and even more importantly, brain degeneration diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's. Monitoring and improving blood flow is crucial for brain health, and hand temperature can be an early warning sign of underlying issues.
Skin conductance refers to the brain's ability to produce sweat in response to stress. During stressful situations, the body should sweat more, and in recovery, it should sweat less. A healthy skin conductance score should fall between 85-90%. When the score is low, like in this example (21.43), it suggests that the nervous system is exhausted and not functioning optimally.
Dry skin, especially in the hands, can indicate a chronic issue where the brain has difficulty coordinating the sweating process. In extreme cases, the engagement (sweating increase) and disengagement (sweating decrease) patterns may reverse, signaling dysfunction in the nervous system. Identifying and addressing these imbalances can be crucial for improving overall brain and nervous system health.
Surface EMG measures the brain and nervous system's ability to control muscle tension, which is crucial for physical responses during stress and recovery. In stress, muscles should tense up, aiding survival, while during recovery, they should relax. A healthy balance of muscle tension is essential for overall wellbeing. In this example, the individual shows low resilience in their muscle response, indicating potential issues such as spinal curvature, muscle tension imbalances, and possibly chronic pain, all signaling trouble with brain communication and recovery processes. These results highlight the importance of proper muscle relaxation during recovery, and improper breathing techniques, like chest and shoulder breathing, could exacerbate stress responses.
Each of these components plays a crucial role in painting a comprehensive picture of your brain health. By understanding these assessments, you can better appreciate the factors influencing your neurological and physiological well-being.
(207) 240-4908
