The Hidden Story Behind Your Resting Heart Rate: What Your RHR Can Reveal About Stress, Recovery & Adaptation

Andrea Samadi shares her personal resting heart rate data to show why measuring over time matters more than fixating on a single score. She explains how trends reveal stress, recovery, and adaptation, and why comparing yourself to your own baseline is the most useful approach.

Learn practical steps to measure consistently, contextualize changes, experiment with one behavior, and use your physiological data to make intentional improvements in sleep, recovery, and performance.

BONUS EPISODE 3: ON THIS EPISODE, WE’LL COVER

✔ What resting heart rate can reveal about stress, recovery, and adaptation over time ✔ The story hidden in my own data — from a high of 57 bpm in February to 53 bpm in August ✔ Why the six-month trend matters — and what my 2% lower average may be telling me ✔ How stress and training load can show up in your physiology before you consciously recognize it ✔ Why recovery and nervous-system regulation matter for building a more resilient baseline ✔ How to find your own RHR baseline instead of comparing yourself with someone else ✔ How to look for deviations and patterns across weeks and months—not individual days ✔ How to connect RHR with sleep, HRV, recovery, training, stress, and life events ✔ How to run your own personal experiment: change one variable, measure, and see what happens ✔ The bigger lesson: What gets measured over time can reveal a story you couldn't see day to day.

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, where we bridge neuroscience, social and emotional learning, and human performance so we can create measurable improvements in our well-being, achievement, leadership, productivity, and results.

I’m Andrea Samadi, and if you’ve been following along through Season 16, you’ll know that we’ve been building what I call The Brain’s Operating System for Human Performance—a neuroscience-based framework designed to help us understand how the different systems of the brain and body work together to influence how we learn, adapt, connect, lead, and ultimately how we perform.

We are currently in Phase 3 where we are covering Movement, Learning and Cognition.

If you just finished Episode 405[i] with Dr. Kristen Holmes, you know we've been looking at recovery as an essential part of our Movement Loop.

Movement → Brain Activation → Attention → Learning → Recovery → Adaptation → Performance → Greater Capacity.

And Kristen's work has reinforced something I've learned after years of tracking my own physiology:

What gets measured gets improved.

But this week, I wanted to dive into my own personal data to show us something I think is easy to miss:

Sometimes what gets measured over time reveals a story you simply couldn't see day to day.

When we're looking at a wearable every morning, it's easy to become focused on today's number.

Today's recovery score.

Today's HRV.

Today's resting heart rate.

Was it higher? Was it lower?

But one number—or even one week—rarely tells us very much about the direction we're actually moving.

It's when we begin to zoom out that patterns emerge.

And that's exactly what happened when I looked more closely at my resting heart rate this year.

What initially looked like a collection of numbers began to tell a much bigger story about stress, recovery, consistency, and adaptation.

So my hope for this episode isn't that you compare your resting heart rate to mine.

Your numbers will be different.

My hope is that this episode encourages you to become curious about your own data.

Maybe you track sleep.

Maybe it's HRV.

Resting heart rate.

Recovery.

Exercise.

Blood pressure.

Steps.

Or even something as simple as your energy, mood, or ability to focus.

Take one metric and zoom out.

Look at three months.

Six months.

Maybe even a year.

And instead of asking, “Is today's number good or bad?”

Ask a different question:

“What is the trend that I’m seeing here, trying to tell me?”

Is something improving?

Is something slowly moving in the wrong direction?

Does your physiology change during periods of higher stress? (like you will see mine did).

Can you see what happens when you sleep more consistently, exercise differently, recover better, or change one habit?

Because sometimes the most valuable insight isn't found in today's score.

It's hidden in the pattern.

And once you can see the pattern, you have information you can actually use.

That's really the purpose of sharing my personal data with you today.

Not to say, “Here's what worked for me, so you should do exactly the same thing.”

But to show you what can happen when we become students of our own physiology.

We measure. Find the tool that works best for you.

We notice. Patterns…ups and downs.

We experiment. We become intentional with our behaviors to change/improve the numbers.

We adjust and try something new/different.

And then we measure again.

Because ultimately, what gets measured gets improved—but what gets measured over time can reveal the story that you tell you more than just a bunch of numbers.

And sometimes that story shows us exactly where our next opportunity for change might be.

And that's exactly what happened with my resting heart rate.

Earlier this year, I watched my monthly average climb to 56...and then 57 beats per minute. You can see my data in the show notes. Sept and October were even, at 54, and then something happened in November that took my RHR up, and it kept climbing. I know what was happening in those months to cause the increase. And I went all out to protect my recovery. I worked on rest, hydration, extra exercise, and recovery sessions.

Then it began coming down.

in March 54 in April 53

The 56 in May isn’t the most accurate representation of what was happening with my data, as we travelled internationally and there were 5 days my whoop didn’t calculate my score correctly (something to do with the change in time zones) so I’m not going to say that I was stressed out during a relaxing vacation.

But something happened that caught my attention. You can see it with the graphics in the show notes.

My newest six-month WHOOP average dropped from 55 to 54 beats per minute—2% lower than the previous six months. This NEW result was highlighted in GREEN for me to notice the improvement.

For the first time in this story, the baseline itself had moved.

And that's what we're going to dive into today.

Because this episode isn't really about whether 53 is a good resting heart rate.

It's about something much more useful:

Do you know your baseline with YOUR RHR—and do you know which direction it's moving?

Even better, if you can forsee that it will be moving up, like I knew it was going to in January/February, do you have strategies in place to buffer the stress, and keep this number as close as you can to your baseline?

Let’s dive into this bonus episode.

The Story Behind My Resting Heart Rate: Do You Know Yours?

There’s a number I’ve been watching for the past year. I watched it raise higher (when I’m stressed) and go lower when I’m doing all the right things to rest and recover.

When I zoom out and look at this number over the past year, it tells a fascinating story about my fitness, recovery, stress, and the way my body is adapting.

That number is my resting heart rate.

And today I want to ask you:

Do you know yours?

Because one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from nearly five years of tracking my physiology is something we’ve talked about throughout this podcast:

What gets measured gets improved.

But I think I need to add something to that.

What gets measured over time reveals the story.

And my newest data makes that clearer than ever.

PART 1 — WHAT IS RESTING HEART RATE?

Resting heart rate, or RHR, is simply the number of times your heart beats per minute while your body is at rest.

Normal Ranges and Fitness[ii]

Average adults: 60 to 100 bpm.

Active adults: 55 to 85 bpm.

Athletes: 40 to 60 bpm, because their heart muscle is strong and pumps blood with ease

For adults, resting heart rate varies considerably between individuals. Fitness, genetics, age, sleep, stress, illness, medications, hydration, alcohol, temperature and training load can all influence it. So I'm not interested in comparing my resting heart rate with someone else's.

I'm interested in comparing me with me.

That's where wearable data becomes useful.

Instead of asking:

“Is 53 good?”

I'm asking:

“What is happening to my baseline over time?”

And that distinction matters.

PART 2 — MY RHR STORY BEGAN WITH A RISE

When I first looked at this data, I focused on January and February.

My monthly resting heart rate had climbed:

January: 56 bpm.

February: 57 bpm.

Those numbers weren't alarming. I was experiencing higher levels of stress than usual at that time, and I was even prepared for the stress.

But relative to my baseline, (55 bpm) the rise caught my attention.

And that's an important distinction.

A wearable isn't diagnosing why something happened.

It can't look at 57 and tell me:

“Andrea, this is stress.”

But it can show me that something has changed.

Then I can look at the rest of my life.

How am I sleeping?

How am I training?

What's my stress level?

Am I recovering?

What has changed?

That's when data becomes feedback.

I was ready to implement some stress reduction strategies to get my RHR and nervous system back to its baseline.

PART 3 — THEN THE PATTERN CHANGED

After February, here's what happened:

March: 54. April: 53. May: 56 (International Trip impacted this data) June: 53. July: 55. August: 53.

And I love this part of the story because it wasn't a perfectly straight line.

My RHR didn't simply go:

57...56...55...54...53.

Real physiology rarely works like that.

There were fluctuations.

May went back to 56.

July went to 55.

But my resting heart rate kept returning to 53.

April: 53.

June: 53.

August: 53.

That's when I began wondering whether I was seeing something more meaningful than a few good months.

And now I have another piece of evidence.

PART 4 — THE NEW SIX-MONTH RESULT

My newest WHOOP six-month report covers February 23 through August 21, 2026.

And this is where the story gets interesting.

My previous six-month average resting heart rate was:

55 bpm.

My newest six-month average is:

54 bpm.

WHOOP shows that as:

2% lower than the previous six months.

One beat per minute doesn't sound dramatic.

But I'm not looking for dramatic.

I'm looking for adaptation.

Something to show me that my body responded to the extra recovery that I was implementing to buffer the higher stress.

For the first time in this particular story, the six-month average itself has moved down.

And that means I'm no longer looking only at a few isolated low readings.

The trend is beginning to move.

PART 5 — THE AVERAGE WAS HIDING THE STORY

This may be my favorite lesson from this entire experiment.

Earlier, when I looked at a different six-month window, my average RHR was 55 bpm.

And the previous six months?

Also 55.

If I had stopped there, I could have concluded:

Nothing changed.

But underneath that average was a changing pattern.

My RHR had risen to 57 in February. This makes sense to me when I glance at the data.

Then it repeatedly returned to 53 with my focus being on rest/recovery.

And eventually the rolling six-month average moved from 55 to 54.

This is why one measurement rarely tells the whole story.

Trends matter.

And sometimes your body is changing before the average catches up.

PART 6 — 57 TO 53

There's another way to look at the data.

February was my highest monthly average in this January–August period:

57 bpm.

August is:

53 bpm.

That's approximately 7% lower than that February high.

I want to be careful with this number because I'm comparing two monthly endpoints—not two six-month averages.

So I wouldn't call this a 7% improvement in my overall cardiovascular health.

But it is another signal inside the larger pattern.

What was happening in February? What is currently happening in August?

And when multiple signals begin pointing in the same direction, (showing an improvement) I’m paying attention.

PART 7 — WHAT CHANGED?

This is where I think self-experimentation becomes powerful.

I didn't respond to the higher numbers by simply exercising harder.

I've spent this year becoming much more intentional about recovery and regulation.

Sleep.

Daily movement.

Zone 2 work.

Meditation.

Hydration.

Infrared sauna.

Red-light therapy.

Paying attention to training strain.

And increasingly, listening to what my physiology is telling me instead of automatically pushing through fatigue.

I've also been experimenting with removing alcohol at different times this year, and the changes I've seen in recovery, HRV, sleep stress and resting heart rate have given me another variable to continue watching.

I can't take this dataset and say:

“This one behavior caused my RHR to fall.”

There are too many variables.

But I can say:

The environment surrounding my physiology changed—and my trend changed with it.

That's worth paying attention to.

PART 8 — WHY DOES A LOWER RHR MATTER?

In many people, particularly when associated with aerobic fitness, a lower resting heart rate can reflect a heart that is able to pump blood efficiently with fewer beats at rest.

Training can increase stroke volume—the amount of blood pumped with each heartbeat.

That means the heart may not need to beat as frequently to deliver the same cardiac output at rest.

Autonomic regulation also plays a role.

The sympathetic nervous system helps mobilize us for action.

The parasympathetic nervous system supports rest-and-recovery processes.

Resting heart rate reflects influences from both, along with many other physiological factors.

That's why I don't view RHR as a standalone score.

I view it as one piece of my physiological dashboard.

RHR.

HRV.

Sleep.

Recovery.

Training load.

And, most importantly:

How I actually feel.

PART 9 — THIS CONNECTS DIRECTLY TO THE MOVEMENT LOOP

Remember the Movement Loop we've been building in Phase 3:

Movement → Brain Activation → Attention → Learning → Recovery → Adaptation → Performance → Greater Capacity.

My RHR data brings us directly back to the part of the loop I don't want us to overlook:

Recovery → Adaptation.

Exercise provides the stimulus.

But we don't become fitter during the stimulus itself.

The body needs an opportunity to respond to that stimulus.

To repair.

To replenish.

To adapt.

And eventually, that adaptation may become visible in our trends.

That's why recovery isn't the opposite of performance.

Recovery is part of the process that makes performance possible.

PART 10 — THE BIGGER LESSON

This episode isn't really about whether your resting heart rate should be 53.

Mine doesn't need to be yours.

Your number might be completely different.

The question is:

Do you know your baseline?

And more importantly:

Do you know which direction it's moving?

What increases it?

What decreases it?

Because your physiology is constantly responding to the way you're living.

Training.

Sleeping.

Recovering.

Working.

Traveling.

Eating.

Drinking.

Managing stress.

And sometimes those changes are happening quietly beneath the surface.

Until you measure them.

PART 11 — HOW TO IMPLEMENT THIS IN YOUR OWN LIFE

So now I want to turn this over to you.

I've shown you my resting heart rate story.

What's yours?

And you don't need five years of WHOOP data to begin looking for it.

You just need enough information to establish your baseline, and then you need to become curious about what causes that baseline to change.

Here's how I would start.

STEP 1 — FIND A WAY TO MEASURE YOUR RESTING HEART RATE CONSISTENTLY

First, find the measurement tool that works for you.

Maybe that's WHOOP.

Maybe it's an Apple Watch, Garmin, Oura Ring, Fitbit, or another wearable.

Or maybe you're tracking your resting heart rate another way.

The specific device isn't the most important part of this experiment. You can even just count your pulse beats that you get in one minute while resting.

Just stay consistent as you measure.

If you're going to look for a trend, you want to compare measurements collected under reasonably consistent conditions.

We're not trying to find the lowest number we can possibly produce.

We're trying to understand our normal pattern.

STEP 2 — LEARN YOUR BASELINE

Next, don't start by asking:

“Is my resting heart rate good?”

Start with:

“What is normal for me?”

Look at your data over time.

If you have it, look at your last month.

Then three months.

Six months.

And eventually a year.

What number—or range—does your RHR tend to return to?

For me, I knew that my baseline was somewhere around the mid-50s.

That's why 56 and 57 caught my attention.

Those numbers weren't necessarily concerning when compared with somebody else's resting heart rate. Someone else I know has a RHR of 80 and that’s in the normal range.

The higher scores mattered to me, because they represented a change from my baseline.

That's the first lesson:

Compare yourself with yourself.

STEP 3 — LOOK FOR THE DEVIATIONS

Once you understand your baseline, look for the places where your data moves away from it.

Don't immediately label the change as good or bad.

Just become curious.

When did your RHR rise?

When did it fall?

Was it one unusual night?

Several days?

Several weeks?

Or did your monthly average actually begin to move?

This is where we stop looking at individual dots and begin looking for a pattern.

STEP 4 — PUT YOUR LIFE NEXT TO YOUR DATA

Now comes the part that I think is the most interesting.

Take the RHR graph and mentally place your life beside it.

Ask yourself:

What was happening here?

Was work unusually stressful?

Were you traveling?

Were you sleeping less?

Were you sick?

Had your training load increased?

Were you drinking more—or less—alcohol?

Had you changed your exercise routine?

Were you recovering differently?

What was happening emotionally?

What was happening physically?

This was important in interpreting my own data.

When I saw my RHR increase in January and February, I knew what was happening in my life during those months.

And when I saw May increase, I also had context: I had been traveling internationally, and I knew there were issues with several days of my wearable data.

Context changes interpretation.

A graph can show you what changed.

Your life can help you investigate why.

STEP 5 — LOOK AT MORE THAN ONE METRIC

Here's another important point.

Don't interpret resting heart rate completely by itself.

Put it next to other information.

What was happening with your HRV?

Your sleep?

Your recovery?

Your training load?

Your energy?

Your stress?

And most importantly:

How did you feel?

One metric gives us a clue.

Multiple signals moving together can give us a much richer picture.

Think of it as your own physiological dashboard.

You're looking for relationships between the signals rather than allowing one number to define whether you're doing well.

STEP 6 — CHOOSE ONE VARIABLE TO EXPERIMENT WITH

Now we move from observation to action.

Ask:

“What is one behavior I could change consistently and then watch what happens?”

Maybe it's getting to bed earlier.

Maybe it's improving hydration.

Adding more Zone 2 exercise.

Building recovery days into your training.

Meditating.

Walking.

Changing your alcohol intake.

Or simply protecting more downtime during a stressful period.

Choose something that's meaningful and realistic for you.

Then give it time.

This is important because we're not trying to manipulate tomorrow morning's score.

We're trying to see whether consistent behavior begins to influence a trend.

STEP 7 — MEASURE AGAIN

And now we come back to the beginning.

Measure.

Notice.

Experiment.

Adjust.

And measure again.

You might even keep a very simple note beside your data:

What changed this month?

You could write:

Higher workload.

Travel.

Better sleep.

Started Zone 2.

Stopped drinking alcohol.

Illness.

Vacation.

More recovery.

Over time, you begin creating something much more useful than a collection of numbers.

You're creating a map of how your body responds to your life.

DISCOVER YOUR RHR STORY

So here's the experiment I want to leave you with.

Pull up your resting heart rate data.

And ask yourself these five questions:

What is my baseline? When does my RHR move above or below that baseline? What was happening in my life when it changed? What other physiological signals moved with it? What is one behavior I could intentionally change and measure over time?

Then zoom out.

Don't judge yourself by tomorrow morning.

Look for the story.

Because the goal isn't to achieve somebody else's resting heart rate.

The goal is to understand your own physiology well enough to recognize when something changes.

And then have strategies available to respond.

That's where measurement becomes useful.

It moves us from simply collecting information...

to using information to make better decisions.

REVIEW — WHAT DID WE LEARN?

Before we close, let's pull everything together.

We started with one simple metric:

resting heart rate.

We learned that RHR tells us how many times our heart beats per minute while we're at rest—but the number becomes much more useful when we stop comparing ourselves with other people and begin comparing ourselves with ourselves.

Then we looked at my own story.

My RHR rose to:

56 bpm in January.

And then:

57 bpm in February.

Because I understood what was happening in my life at the time, those increases gave me information I could use.

Rather than simply pushing harder, I became increasingly intentional about recovery.

Then the pattern began to change.

My RHR repeatedly returned toward 53.

And eventually something even more interesting happened.

My newest six-month average moved from:

55 bpm → 54 bpm.

WHOOP identified that as:

2% lower than my previous six-month average.

One beat per minute.

Not dramatic.

But that's exactly the point.

We're not looking for dramatic. We're looking for patterns.

We're looking for evidence that the system may be adapting over time.

And that's why my biggest lesson from this experiment isn't:

“My resting heart rate is 53.”

It's:

“I understand my resting heart rate better than I did before.”

I know my baseline.

I know some of the circumstances that push it higher.

I'm beginning to understand some of the behaviors associated with it moving lower.

And most importantly, I know to keep watching the trend.

CONCLUSION — BECOME A STUDENT OF YOUR OWN PHYSIOLOGY

This brings us back to something Dr. Kristen Holmes reinforced in Episode 405:

What gets measured gets improved.

But after looking at this data, I want to expand that idea.

What gets measured gives us information.

What gets measured consistently reveals patterns.

And what gets measured over time can reveal a story.

That's the opportunity I hope you take away from this episode.

Become curious about your own physiology.

Not obsessed with it.

Not controlled by a score.

Curious.

Learn your baseline.

Notice when something changes.

Put that change into the context of your life.

Experiment thoughtfully.

And then zoom back out and see what happened.

Because ultimately, we're not collecting data just to collect more data.

We're trying to turn:

Data → Awareness → Action → Adaptation.

And that brings us right back to our Movement Loop:

Movement → Brain Activation → Attention → Learning → Recovery → Adaptation → Performance → Greater Capacity.

Your resting heart rate is only one metric.

But it gives us a perfect example of what adaptation can look like when we stop staring at today's number and start paying attention to the larger pattern.

So sometime after listening to this episode, open your own data.

Go back three months.

Six months.

A year if you can.

And ask yourself:

“What story has my body been trying to tell me?”

You might be surprised by what you find.

COMING NEXT — BONUS EPISODE 4

And there's one part of my own physiological dashboard that I deliberately haven't explored deeply today.

Sleep.

Because recovery doesn't end when we stop exercising.

Some of the most important recovery processes happen while we're asleep.

So before we return to Dr. John Medina and move deeper into attention, learning, and cognition, I want to stay with the recovery side of our Movement Loop for one more bonus episode.

In Bonus Episode 4, we're going to investigate restorative sleep.

What exactly is restorative sleep?

How can we measure it?

What can our sleep data tell us?

And perhaps most importantly:

How can we use that information to improve the way we recover, adapt, and perform?

We'll apply the same approach we used today.

Not just:

“How did I sleep last night?”

But:

“What story is my sleep telling me over time?”

Because movement creates the stimulus.

Recovery creates the opportunity to adapt.

And sleep may be one of the most important places where that recovery takes place.

I'll see you next time for Bonus Episode 4: The Story Behind My Restorative Sleep.

REFERENCES

[i]Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast EPISODE 405 “Movement Isn’t Enough: How Recovery Drives Adaptation”

https://andreasamadi.podbean.com/e/movement-isnt-enough-how-recovery-drives-real-adaptation/

[ii] Health Direct “What is RHR?” https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/resting-heart-rate