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.
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. We found that out of all of the positive emotions itself, being excited related the highest to heart coherence.
So with that, ask yourselves, in all facets of life, in whatever you’re doing, are you excited? Are you happy to be doing that? Because that happiness will correlate to your health. This is highlighted with what culture has said to us for thousands of years. What you feel is how you function.
Additionally, our research found that the optimal rhythm of breathing to improve this state is a 10-second breathing cycle. So what that means is five seconds of inhale and five seconds of exhale. Now this perfectly syncs your brain, your heart, and your lungs to play out the symphony of the orchestra within you. And we also found that the common frequency was 0.1 hertz. And that might sound like a technical term, but it’s actually very simple. It just means the 10-second breathing cycle, which is about six breaths per minute.
So with that, you can tune your heartbeat and your body like an instrument. You can go from frustrated and shift into appreciation.
Taking Action: Bringing Change to My School
So to take action for this, I brought a heart coherence club to my school. And over there, we do research about heart coherence, and we do techniques to improve it for us as a whole and as high schoolers. And this is extremely important because with media and everything else, the world has become extremely fast-paced. We have so many stresses, social pressures we see every day, academic pressures. Is my GPA good enough? Am I doing good enough as XYZ?
And so to get rid of this, I’ve set up a support group at our school that helps students that are struggling with anxiety and depression.
Interactive Heart Coherence Practice
So I want to make this more interactive. We are going to implement a heart coherence practice in real time. So take a second with two fingers, put it on your neck or your wrist, and find your pulse point. Deeply listen to your heartbeat. Each beat is a note that composes its grand symphony in your life. Let’s take a moment here.
Now to take this a step further, breathe in for about five seconds and breathe out at a pace that’s comfortable for you. As you do this, focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine that your breath is flowing in and out of the heart and chest area, breathing slower and deeper than usual. And as you do this, find a rhythm that is comfortable for you. Right now, you’re putting your body in sync with your mind.
As you’re doing this, activate and sustain a regenerative feeling of care, love and compassion. You can think about a happy memory, someone you love, and sustain that feeling. Now take that feeling and radiate it to the world around you. Do you guys feel more relaxed? Yes.
So that is actually one of the techniques that’s been proven to improve your heart rate variability. And what’s so stunning about this is that HRV isn’t something set in stone. It’s something that you can change, no matter your age, no matter where you’re from.
A Call to Action
And so with that, I encourage every one of you to practice these powerful techniques in your everyday life as you uplift one another, just like my grandfather uplifted me. Maybe you do this before an interview you might think is stressful. Maybe you do this before an exam. Maybe you just get together as a community and try to spread awareness and communicate with each other in a perfect frequency.
Like my grandfather said, “Whatever you do, do it wholeheartedly.” And it’s with that spirit I want to give to you today and to the world. So before I close, inspire yourself and take that moment to inspire those people around you and join hands and come together with heart coherence.
How will you harness your heart rhythm to inspire change within and around you? Thank you guys.
