My heart had been trying to warn me for months. I just wasn't listening.

One afternoon, my smartwatch suddenly buzzed with a heart health notification I wasn't expecting. A close friend had recently learned that she had suffered two silent heart attacks without realising it, so my mind immediately jumped to the worst.

I opened the Health app warily, only to realise that the notification wasn’t warning me about danger at all. Instead, it was good news: my heart rate variability had increased significantly. Heart rate variability (HRV) refers to the natural variation in the time between heartbeats and is one indicator of how the body responds to stress. An increase in my HRV suggested that my body was experiencing less physiological stress than before, making this an encouraging sign (Cleveland Clinic, 2021)

Motivated by the positive turn of events, I decided to take the time to look at the data, coming face to face with my everyday life on a screen. Looking back, I saw the months of late-night working, 3 am awakenings with heart palpitations, and weekends spent trying to squeeze life into gaps around work. But it didn't feel unusual. Everyone I knew was under the same pressure, urged to do more with less and trying to survive.

I became curious about the shift; what had given me the heart rate variability that my watch found flag-worthy? I opened my calendar to line it up with the day things changed.

At first it struck me that my calendar on that Monday was no different than any other, and I was confused as to why my heart was suddenly behaving this way.

But then I looked back at what happened on the previous Friday and it hit me: a tiny meeting tucked away in the early morning where I found out that someone I'd found it difficult to work with was leaving the business. From the moment I learned that my heart started to behave differently.

What struck me most was that nothing else had changed. I hadn't ramped up my cardiovascular activity, slept more, or managed stress any better than before. My calendar looked identical. The only thing that had shifted was my heart's response, which lay entirely outside of my consciousness.

As it turns out, my heart had been trying to send me signals for months. I was simply too busy to notice them, or perhaps too practised at ignoring them.

But what also struck me was how disconnected my mind was from what my heart already knew. Ever the “silver-lining” type, I had tried to focus on the learnings I was gaining from this difficult working relationship. I'd been telling myself a story of how this was helping me to grow. But I wasn't growing. I was shrinking as much as my heart rate variability.

I wish I could say that from that day on I walked away from toxic interactions that spiked my stress levels. (Spoiler alert: it didn't; I'm still very much a work in progress). But something did change: I started to pay attention to the moments my body entered fight-or-flight mode and began practising the courage to protect my heart.

If this story feels uncomfortably familiar, you’re not alone.

In honour of International Self Care day 2026 I'm offering 3 free stress coaching sessions for people who recognise themselves in these words. If you’d like one of those conversations, email me at [email protected] to claim a place.

Let's take care of ourselves. We only get one heart.