Read the full transcript of Sai Balaji’s talk titled “Your Heart’s Hidden Superpower”, at TEDxHarmony Science Academy Dallas High, June 13, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
A Personal Loss That Changed Everything
Sai Balaji: Have you ever had someone in your life that inspired you? For me, that was my grandfather. This picture means the world to me. My grandfather and I had just completed one of the most challenging treks in the world to Mount Kailash, over 19,000 feet above the ground. Together we stood strong and proud having completed this feat. But little did I know this would be the last picture I would ever take with him.
Because just a year later, as COVID shut down the world, my grandfather suffered a heart attack. For 15 long, arduous days, he was stuck in a coma. And eventually he passed due to septic shock. In those 15 long days, the feeling of helplessness consumed me. It was the worst feeling in the whole entire world. I was just 12 years old at the time, and I was devastated.
In the silence that followed, I was stewing in my thoughts. And I started asking myself, is there any way we can prevent this from happening to people like my grandfather, and preventing the pain that comes from that? As I did my research, I became fascinated with the body, the heart, and the mind, and the interesting, thought-provoking connection between these three fields. And through that, I figured out and identified a hidden superpower in our heart called heart rate variability.
Understanding Heart Rate Variability
So before I go on, let me first explain what heart rate variability is at its crux. So we can see on the graph the blue heart and the red heart. Both hearts have the same average beats per minute. But in the blue heart, there is a difference in the time between the beats, so the interbeat intervals. In the blue heart, there is more variation between these beats. And in the red heart, there is less variation.
In the red heart, it is rigid and it’s steady, like a metronome. And while that’s useful in music, it’s not exactly adaptable in the body. But the blue heart is like a jazz musician, flowing with the beat, adjusting to the moment. The blue heart highlights adaptability, and it lets your heart relax and adjust to all the challenges that life throws at us.
Why HRV Matters: Four Key Benefits
Now more about why HRV matters. First of all, HRV empowers emotional intelligence. When your nervous system is in its parasympathetic state, meaning you have high heart rate variability indicating you are more relaxed and adaptable, your connection with the people around you and your emotional state and awareness heightens.
Stronger focus. So there was actually a really interesting study completed with first-year university students that showed that students with higher heart rate variabilities had stronger academic performance. And I myself have seen this in my own performance as a student in high school.
Next, better athletic performance. With a balanced nervous system, you can optimally train for any sort of athletic performance you’re going to do, and even in competitive sports such as swimming, they use HRV to tailor practices and methods for their competitors.
And lastly, self-regulation skills. So I play the flute, and every year at our auditions, it’s extremely high stress. So to kind of set the scene, you’re in a little room at a high school, and all of your competitors are watching you as you’re playing for a panel of judges hidden by a curtain. You start to become super nervous. I’ve seen people have panic attacks when they’re here, and I myself was extremely nervous when I would do this. My breathing would quicken, my hands would sweat. I would look at the notes, and I’d just see blobs.
But as I started implementing practices to help my HRV increase, my chair placements increased in number. But also, I felt good, and I felt joyful performing for a crowd. I started to really, really love it.
Research and Discovery
So in my process and my journey through research, I created a machine learning model that could predict early signs of sepsis using heart rate variability as inspired by what happened to my grandfather. And this is what motivated me to research more into heart rate variability as a biometric.
And so I found the HeartMath Institute, which has been doing heart rate variability research since the 1980s. And there I met Dr. Roland McCraty, one of the fathers of modern heart rate variability research. And there I learned about heart rhythm coherence.
So in the graph, we can see in the coherent state, the heart rhythm is like a sine wave, very steady, and like the waves of the ocean. But in incoherence, it is a barrage of chaos. And this connects to our emotional states. So we can see that gratitude, feeling calm, feeling excited, correlates with coherence. And coherence also means high heart rate variability.
And so that’s what reminded me of what my band director has told me numerous times in our band. He always says it takes a lot more energy to be angry than to be nice. And what’s more, the research I’d done actually proved this.
Groundbreaking Research Findings
In our research, we did a comprehensive study with 1.8 million heart rhythm sessions worldwide using the Inner Balance biofeedback app. And what we found was absolutely stunning. Positive emotions related to heart harmony. So we can see in the graph that positive emotions like joyfulness, excitedness, they all improve your heart rate variability, your heart coherence. And it’s way higher than the ones with the negative emotions.
And the negative emotions is like an orchestra or a symphony that’s out of tune, while with the positive one, you’re having a beautiful symphony of in-tune instruments. So this is what excitement looks like. Excitement is the driver of heart coherence.