With increasing awareness of the impact stress has on our health, more people are turning to apps to track their stress levels and heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is the variation in time between each heartbeat and can provide insight into overall health and stress levels. Luckily, there are several apps available that can help you monitor your HRV and stress levels.
Also, the relationship between exercise and stress has been well documented. Whether that’s using exercise as a stress reduction tool or to ensure that athletes include enough periods of rest and recovery to avoid overtraining stress.
In this article, we’ll highlight five of the best apps for tracking your HRV and stress levels, so you can find the one that best fits your needs. In particular, we’ve mentioned apps that also track your exercise activity and can be integrated with other health and fitness apps and devices.
But before we get to the apps, let’s explain a little further about HRV and how it is affected by stress and lifestyle.
What is Heart Rate Variability (HRV)?
HRV is the variation in time between each heartbeat. It is not the same as your heart rate, which is measured in beats per minute. A healthy heart does not beat at a set rate, as it is greatly influenced by the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. HRV reflects the activity of these two control systems and provides important insights into your overall health, resilience, and adaptability.
How Stress Levels Affect HRV
Stress actually decreases HRV, which can negatively affect both physical and mental health. Long periods of high stress can lead to chronic low HRV, which makes you more susceptible to illness and disease. To maintain optimal HRV, it’s important to incorporate stress-management techniques into your daily life. For example, sleep, exercise and relaxation techniques such as meditation and deep breathing exercises help to manage stress.
How Lifestyle Factors Affect HRV
Exercise: Regular exercise has been shown to increase HRV, indicating better parasympathetic nervous system activity. However, overtraining or training with high intensity and low amounts of rest can decrease HRV.
Sleep: Poor sleep quality and quantity can lead to decreased HRV. Aim for 7-9 hours of quality sleep a night to maintain good HRV.
Diet: A healthy diet with plenty of fruits, vegetables, and lean protein has been shown to increase HRV, while a high-fat or high-sugar diet can decrease HRV.
What features to look for in an effective app that tracks HRV
Here’s some guidance to understand what makes an effective HRV tracking app. First of all, look for an app that graphs your HRV over time to give you a clear picture of any trends or changes. Secondly, find an app that allows you to rate your stress level daily, so you can identify whether your HRV is affected by stress. Thirdly, the best HRV apps allow you to record additional data to give you a more comprehensive view of your health, such as sleep, exercise, and nutrition. Finally, look for an app that translates HRV and stress data into meaningful insights and actionable steps to help you manage your stress levels better.
Apps that Track Stress Levels and Monitor HRV
So, here’s our 5 apps that we recommend giving a try if you would like to better manage stress in your daily life. However, if you own a SMART device or fitness tracker then check what features they have to track stress and also if it monitors HRV. Also, many of these devices will also be compatible with the followings apps. So, if you’re an athlete, exercise regularly or interested to know the relationship between exercise and stress then these apps are worth a try.
Welltory
Welltory is a free app that allows you to track your HRV through the camera and flash on your mobile phone. It tracks blood flow in your index finger to monitor HRV. Welltory also further evaluates your stress levels by requesting users to take a self test that asks questions about your mood state. The app uses AI to provide personalised recommendations to improve your health and reduce stress levels. With Welltory, you can track your daily activity, sleep, nutrition, and mood, and get detailed insights into your HRV trends. There is also a premium version to receive more in-depth insights regarding your heart health.
Additional Costs: Premium subscription costs £6.67 per month or £79.99 per year
Requires additional hardware for HRV tracking: No
The app is available on the Apple Store and Google Play
Read our full review of the Welltory App here.
HRV4Training
If you’re a serious athlete or coach then HRV4Training is an app designed with athletes in mind. It’s more suited towards sports performance than tracking everyday stress levels, particularly as it’s a paid for app and subscription model. However, I couldn’t leave it out as its features and insights from HRV recordings are excellent.
The app uses the phone camera to measure HRV accurately and provides daily insights to help monitor training intensity and recovery. The app provides daily insights based on HRV measurements, including a daily readiness score that helps athletes monitor their recovery and adjust their training intensity accordingly. HRV4Training also provides recommendations for daily training, based on the athlete’s HRV and fitness goals.
HRV4Training integrates with other fitness tracking apps like Strava, TrainingPeaks, and Garmin, allowing athletes to monitor their HRV and training data in one place. This integration provides a comprehensive view of an athlete’s training load, HRV, and other key metrics, allowing them to adjust their training and recovery strategies for optimal performance.
In addition to monitoring HRV, HRV4Training provides other useful features such as sleep tracking, stress monitoring, and mindfulness exercises. These tools help athletes to manage their stress levels and improve their overall wellness, which can lead to improved performance on and off the field.
Ideal app For Coaches to Monitor Their Team or Athletes
Overall, HRV4Training is a powerful tool for athletes and coaches who want to optimise their training and recovery strategies for improved performance. By providing daily insights based on HRV measurements, HRV4Training helps athletes to monitor their recovery. The coach can then adjust athletes training intensity for optimal results. The app’s Team paid subscription features also make it a useful tool for coaches who want to monitor the training load and recovery of their athletes.
It’s probably overkill for the everyday person who just wants to analyse their stress. Although, if you’re trying to balance busy lifestyles, stressful periods and keeping up your training it provides you with all the information you need to make sure that you are managing stress and training loads.
Additional Costs: The app costs £9.99 on the Apple Store and £10.49 on Google Play. There is also a subscription for more serious athletes and coaches. The Pro subscription costs €45 per month and the Team subscription for coaches costs €30 for each athlete per month.
Requires additional hardware for HRV tracking: No
Elite HRV
Elite HRV is a free app. Its purpose is to help users track their heart rate variability (HRV) and stress levels. The app requires a HRV compatible heart rate monitor to be synced to it via Bluetooth. Elite HRV provides detailed insights into your stress levels and overall health. This includes daily readiness scores, training recommendations, and personalised insights based on your HRV data.
HRV Testing Frequency
One of the key features of Elite HRV is its ability to customise testing frequency. This means that users can choose how often they want to measure their HRV. For example, whether it’s daily or a few times a week, depending on their needs and preferences. Through it’s biofeedback feature, the app provides real-time feedback on how stress is affecting your body. It’s useful insight that allows you to adjust your workout accordingly accordingly, such as adjust your breathing rate. Furthermore, the biofeedback feature provides feedback on your HRV and lifestyle in general. For example, if your HRV is lower than usual, you may need to prioritise stress management strategies like mindfulness, meditation, or sleep to improve your overall health and wellness.
Elite HRV also offers integration with other popular health and wellness apps enabling users to keep track of their health metrics in one place.
In addition to HRV tracking, Elite HRV provides a range of tools to help users manage stress and improve overall wellness. The app includes breathing exercises, guided meditations, and other stress management techniques, helping users to manage stress levels and improve recovery.
Overall, Elite HRV is a useful tool for anyone interested in monitoring their HRV and stress levels. The app’s customisable testing frequency, real-time bio-feedback, and integration with other health and wellness apps also make it a convenient and accessible tool for tracking HRV and managing stress.
Additional Costs: The app is free but the desktop version has an upgraded subscription for $8 per month to receive more insights and analysis via a desktop dashboard. For teams and coaches the subscription begins at $30 per month.
Requires additional hardware for HRV tracking: Yes
The app is available on the Apple Store or Google Play
SweetBeat HRV
SweetBeat HRV is an app that allows users to track their heart rate variability (HRV) and stress levels using a compatible heart rate monitor. They recommend the following guidelines for HRV monitoring:
“A tested Bluetooth Low Energy Heart Rate Monitor, Wellue DuoEK hand held heart rate monitor or a Wellue VisualBeat heart rate monitor patch.”
One of the key features of SweetBeat HRV is its advanced visual analytics, which provide detailed insight into HRV and stress levels over time. The app also provides real-time coaching to help users reduce stress levels, including breathing exercises and mindfulness techniques. This feature is particularly useful for busy professionals or athletes who may be prone to high levels of stress and need immediate guidance on how to manage it.
Training Effect Score Useful for Athlete to Train at the Right Intensity
Another unique feature of SweetBeat HRV is its “training effect” score, which helps users optimise their training intensity based on HRV recovery status. This feature is particularly useful for athletes who want to train at their maximum capacity without risking injury or burnout. The app provides recommendations on the intensity and duration of training sessions based on the user’s HRV recovery status. This helps them avoid overtraining and maximise their performance.
SweetBeat HRV also offers integration with other popular health and wellness. In addition to HRV tracking, SweetBeat HRV provides a range of tools to help users manage stress. The app includes breathing exercises, guided meditations, and other stress management techniques, helping users to manage stress levels and improve recovery.
In general, anyone interested in monitoring their HRV and stress levels would find SweetBeat HRV to be a powerful tool. Its advanced visual analytics, real-time coaching, and “training effect” score make it particularly useful for athletes and busy professionals who need immediate feedback on their recovery status and training intensity.
Additional Costs: It costs $9.99 to download from the Apple Store
Requires additional hardware for HRV tracking: Yes
Gyroscope Health
Gyroscope Health is an innovative health and wellness platform that offers a wide range of tools and features to help users improve their physical and mental well-being.
One of the standout features of the platform is its ability to monitor stress levels in real-time. This is useful for anyone looking to manage their stress and improve their overall quality of life.
The stress monitoring feature on Gyroscope Health employs a combination of biometric data and machine learning algorithms for tracking stress-associated changes in the body. Gyroscope can use most of the sensors from your phone. However, this app does require data collected from devices such as wearable fitness trackers, heart rate monitors, and other health sensors for a comprehensive analysis of heart health and stress. Gyroscope then acts as an operating dashboard which analyses the data to provide users with personalised insights into their stress levels.
However, despite requiring the use of additional hardware to retrieve the biometric data to monitor stress, I’ve included it in my list as it also includes nutritional tracking. A neat feature that the other apps don’t include.
Although, Gyroscope does require a monthly paid subscription to unlock many of it’s tracking and useful features.
Additional Costs: There are 3 tiers of pricing: $29 per month, $99 per month and $199 per month. For a comparison of the various features for each tier of pricing, visit their website here
Requires additional hardware for HRV tracking: Yes
The app is available on the Apple Store or Google Play
Benefits of tracking HRV and stress levels
Stress has an impact on our health and well-being, and by tracking HRV, we can better manage stress levels and overall health. The apps mentioned in this article provide excellent tools to monitor HRV and stress levels and allowing you to identify trends easily over time. They also provide useful insight for athletes or fitness enthusiasts on how their training and lifestyle is influencing their stress and HRV to know when to rest and recover. With the right app, you can take a proactive approach to managing your overall health and optimise your daily routine to reduce stress levels and improve your well-being and fitness.
