The more you study, research, and work in the field of human optimization, the more incredible our nervous system seems to become.
Here's just one example...
Your Nervous System Has Two Modes
Your body has a built-in stress system that responds and kicks in when something scares or stresses you out called the sympathetic nervous system.
You've probably heard it called fight-or-flight.
Your heart speeds up, your muscles tense, your brain goes on high alert and it's great in a real emergency.
The other side of your nervous system is called the parasympathetic system.
Think of it as rest-and-repair mode. It's the one that slows your heart down, helps you digest food, lets you sleep deeply, and this is the important part, helps your body heal.
The problem is that for a lot of people, the sympathetic nervous system never really shuts off...
A 2025 scientific paper by a team of researchers led by Dr. Joseph Errico found something that changes the way we think about aging.
They argued that the main reason our bodies age isn't attributable to just one thing... It's not just inflammation, DNA damage, or stress.
It's the slow, steady loss of balance between those two nervous system modes.
When fight-or-flight is always winning, the rest-and-repair system can't keep up. And over time, that imbalance drives almost every major sign of aging:
- damaged cells
- a weakened immune system
- chronic low-grade inflammation
- worn-out organs
They called this pattern inflammaging — inflammation that builds up slowly over years, not because something is acutely wrong, but because your body never fully gets the chance to recover.
How does HRV come into play?
Heart rate variability (HRV) is the small variation in time between your heartbeats.
It sounds technical, but the concept is simple: a healthy heart doesn't beat like a metronome. It speeds up slightly when you breathe in and slows down when you breathe out. The more flexible it is, the better.
A good HRV score is a sign that your parasympathetic nervous system is doing its job keeping you balanced and adaptable.
A low HRV usually means your body is stuck in stress mode, even when there's nothing actually threatening you.
Your HRV tends to go down as you get older, and that's normal, but the Errico research suggests that HRV decline is actually more than just a symptom of aging and may in fact be one of the things driving it!
Another example is seen you exercise.
How quickly your heart rate drops back to normal is a sign of your overall wellness trajectory.
If it takes a long time to come down, your rest-and-repair system may not be as strong as it could be.
So what can I do about this?
You may have heard that omega-3s are good for inflammation, and they are.
But there's a catch...
Your body has to convert them into something called SPMs (Specialized Pro-resolving Mediators) before they can actually do the work of calming inflammation and repairing tissue.
That conversion process breaks down as you get older, when you're under chronic stress, or if your diet isn't great.
So you can (and probably should) take fish oil every day. But there's a more direct path to what your body actually needs.
HRV+ skips that bottleneck of converting omega 3's into SPMs by delivering pre-formed SPMs directly, along with CBDA and terpenes that support the part of your nervous system responsible for rest and repair.
The Errico paper actually found that when the parasympathetic system activates through the vagus nerve (the main communication line between your brain and body) it directly triggers the release of SPMs from your immune cells.
In other words, it found that those two systems are connected AND that supporting one supports the other.
So for the optimized person, the goal isn't to block inflammation, It's to help your body finish what it started and then clean up, repair, and reset.
That way, you're not carrying the weight of unresolved stress in your cells day after day, year after year and can instead live, recover, and move towards thriving!
Your capacity to enjoy your life depends on that reset happening.
Not just once, but consistently and repeatedly over time.
That's what we're here to support.
To physiological resilience,
Don Moxley
Head of Applied Sciences
Mode + Method
Reference: Errico JP, Ben-Azu B, Gargus M, Newell Rogers MK, Tremblay MÈ. "Sympathetic-parasympathetic system deregulation theory of aging." npj Aging (2025) 11:100. doi:10.1038/s41514-025-00293-2