Frequency Flywheels: Resilience and Emotional Sustainability
One phenomena we at Frequency like to recognize and harness is the flywheel effect, describing a relationship between multiple factors that reinforce one another (if I smile more, I’ll feel happier, so I’ll smile more, so I’ll feel happier…). While this interrelation can be seen in all aspects of life, we like to focus on the flywheel effects that get people feeling good. For this article, we’ll be covering such a relationship that occurs between two of our Frequency Badges of Wellbeing: Resilience and Emotional Sustainability.
To understand the relationship between resilience and emotional sustainability, it’s worth briefly covering each individually.
In short, your resilience refers to your ability to bounce back from stressors in a healthy and elastic way. This capability can be conveniently measured by your heart rate variability, which measures variance in time between single heart beats. What this represents, at a broader scale, is your body’s ability to make quick, small adjustments to accommodate a stressor in the moment that it occurs.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
The variation in tempo and timing between individual heart beats. It reflects your body's ability to react and adapt to stressors within the span of a single heartbeat. High-functioning HRV is important because it manifests as resilience. A lack of resilience means that you have trouble calming yourself when you’re stressed, and that you’re not easily adaptable to changes in your personal life and environment.
This ability to make quick, small adjustments is much less challenging than making slower, infrequent adjustments, which must address whatever compounding impact the stressful incident caused, in addition to the immediate stress response. It’s essentially the difference between your body catching a snowball of stress towards the top of the hill rather than towards the bottom – it’s way easier to catch the snow marble at the top! Given that a higher HRV limits the negative impacts of stressors (a key variable in this discussion), it’s no shock to find that HRV is correlated with lower levels of chronic inflammation (another key variable).
Emotional sustainability, the other piece of this flywheel, is Frequency’s way of broadly describing an attainable balance where you experience the full range of emotions, but they don’t erode your ability to consistently and reliably function at a reasonable level. We define emotional sustainability as you experiencing your emotions as part of the flow of life, rather than as barriers that impede you from functioning. From our research, we’ve found that inflammation and chronic stress are two significant aspects of emotional sustainability that can be positively impacted by your environment, either through passive factors that promote psychological wellbeing or through access to more proactive amenities to help counter inflammation and chronic stress (check out Frequency’s Emotional Sustainability Badge to learn more).
As you’re probably gathering, resilience and emotional sustainability are heavily related because they are both impacted by inflammation and chronic stress levels. Higher than normal inflammation levels place higher than normal stress on the body, manifesting in a range of uncomfortable and stressful outcomes. On the flip side, stressful incidents (injuries, heartbreak, ingestion of toxins) tend to increase inflammation, yielding the potential inflammation and stress to reinforce one another. Given this relationship between inflammation and stress, it is easy to see how resilience and emotional sustainability are related as well.
Of course, with unhealthy coping mechanisms, this relationship can become cyclical and damaging. It is extremely common for stressful incidents (argument, overwork, dog eats homework) to be met with coping mechanisms that increase inflammation and stress (indulgence in unhealthy foods, alcohol, or nicotine) and therefore reduce resilience. These types of coping mechanisms negatively impact the body and induce highs that are inevitably met by equal lows, wreaking havoc on emotional sustainability. As you’ve probably witnessed, this cycle can quickly get out of hand in a way that is unsustainable.
From our point of view, there are three key ways you can augment your environment to break this cycle:
Integrate de-stressors (neuroaesthetic design, biophilia, positive psychology messaging, thermal health) that are backed by science as being comforting and reducing stress
Integrate resilience-builders (great air quality, sauna, cold plunge) that improve HRV and, more generally, are shown as being positive for health and wellbeing
Have resources that grant access to, or reinforce, healthy coping mechanisms (access to holistic wellbeing resources, momentum-breaking experiences, and a supportive environment)
Our hope is that these three strategies will:
Reduce baseline levels of stress
Improve stress response, resulting in less discomfort from incidences of stress
Encourage healthy coping, reducing the compounding impact of stress
This relationship between resilience and emotional sustainability and their connection via stress and inflammation is a key motivator for us to equip our buildings with designs and technologies that de-stress, build resilience, and holistically support occupants. While we understand that environment is only one component and that stress levels are high for so many reasons in today's society, there is a proven link between stress and environment, and we want to do our part by providing a stress-free environment and equipping you with additional resources to help you manage stress and navigate difficult seasons of life. Being resilient and living sustainably are essential to feeling good, so we don’t believe you should accept an environment that supports anything less.
If you’re curious to learn more, check out the resources below: