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Try this. Immerse your face in cold water and watch your heart rate plummet

5 points by awyu ↗ HN
So just tried this. Immersed my face in a sink of cold tap water. Programmed my Apple Watch to read out my live heart rate readings. Resting HR = 89, after immersion immediately plummeted to 61 then carried on dropping as far as 53. Not sure if this is the "master switch of life" as per the TED article author but definitely worth a try. May upload binary to Github. Can anyone think of any cool APP-lications for this? http://ideas.ted.com/science_of_freediving/

9 comments

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Spare_account
Depending the place I looked, a testing heart rate of 89 may be a cause for concern. Some places say anywhere up to 100 is 'normal' but this one says over 85 is 'poor' (you may want to consider improving your fitness levels): http://www.topendsports.com/testing/heart-rate-resting-chart...
debacle
I agree with Spare_account. Anything over 75 is cause for concern. You may want to speak with your doctor.
BjoernKW
That's just wrong. 60 to 80 is ok and the average healthy heart rate also varies by gender and age.
gburt
By the sounds of it he was standing at the sink in order to do this. That's not "resting" for the sake of a resting heart rate.

Edit: for instance, I just tested mine from sitting (at my desk) to standing beside my desk it increases 25 points, on the linked chart going from "athlete" to "below average."

BjoernKW
Everything from 60 to 80 is normal. 89 is slightly high but usually is not a cause for concern in medical terms. The site you mentioned is about sports and fitness. So, while 89 isn't exactly great in terms of fitness, taken by itself it doesn't point to a medical condition.
darrelld
I think this may be mammalian response to being submerged in water in an effort to need less oxygen
cdvonstinkpot
When I was a kid, I had a heart condition called 'SVT'- Supra-Ventricular Tachycardia. When you're born, you have a collection of nerve endings which control the heart rate, & normally, the weaker ones die off & leave a single strong connection. In my case I had a tie for the heartbeat-signalling transmitters. They would oftentimes get caught up in a feedback loop which would leave me with a double heart rate until something would interrupt them & set a hiccup to make my heart just listen to the dominant transmitter again. It was eventually rectified vie an Radio Frequency (RF) Ablation procedure which burned & killed the second-strongest transmitter causing the problem. But before I had the operation I was instructed to dunk my head in ice water when I had an attack- to try to initiate a hiccup & disable the second-in-command transmitter. Another technique was to do a handstand & stay upside-down as long as it took for the gravity to cause an interruption in the signals enough to disengage the offending transmitter. Yet another technique was to bear down as if I'm taking a constipated dump, which increases blood pressure in spurts & would issue just enough resistance to stop the feedback loop. The most effective of these methods was the ice water & I remember since it wasn't readily available at school, I'd be upside down alot of times in the hallway outside my classroom- & it took forever to get it under control alot of the time. I got picked on for that- it sucked.