Chronic stress strains the whole body by over-activating the sympathetic nervous system, releasing stress hormones like cortisol, making breathing shallow and fast, and sending heart rate up and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) down.

When the fight-or-flight response is overactive it makes it physiologically harder to focus, meditate, relax, or sleep. Your body and mind are both signaling each other that you are unsafe, under threat, and need to be escaping danger — not sleeping or focusing on work. It leaves you sleepless, restless, distracted, and in overdrive.

Sleep, meditation, deep breathing practices, touch therapy, and regular exercise help you to recover from stress by engaging and training the parasympathetic nervous system, but they are all physically and mentally harder to do when you’re overwhelmed by chronic stress. To improve your resilience to stress, you can tap into your nervous system, the root of stress, through the sense of touch.

There is a deep biological connection between your sense of touch and your emotional wellbeing. When you touch something, the touch receptors in the skin send a signal to the center of the brain, and that signal branches in two directions: one to your somatosensory cortex, the part that characterizes if the touch is soft, rough, slow, fast, hot, or cold and the second to your emotional cortex, the feeling part of feeling, the part that associates emotion with touch.

When you feel the Apollo wearable, you feel more than vibration, you feel a rhythm that signals your emotional cortex to evoke a certain state, the same way that the right song can set a mood.

Heart rate variability (HRV) is one of the most reliable biomarkers of resilience and ability to recover from stress. HRV is a measure of the variability between heartbeats, a function controlled by your autonomic nervous system. When your HRV increases, it indicates a more balanced nervous system ready to adapt to the ebbs and flows of the day.

Low HRV indicates that you are not recovered — your body isn’t bouncing back from stress and is spending too much time in fight-or-flight mode. This is also a sign that you’re more likely to get sick and less likely to recover quickly.

The goal is to increase parasympathetic activity because doing so sends our blood (and all the good stuff it carries with it like oxygen and glucose) to the parts of your body important for recovery, sleep, reproduction, digestion, empathy, and immunity. This helps decrease the chances of getting sick and improves the quality of life on the whole. High HRV indicates that your nervous system is in balance and you’re able to adapt, perform when needed, and bounce back quickly from stress.