You’ve just wrapped up a relaxing yoga session. You feel zen. Centered. Like you could narrate a nature documentary in a whisper-voice. You open Harvee, expecting a gold star for your inner peace, and wait, what? Your stress level is elevated?
Or maybe it’s the opposite: you’re racing to meet a deadline, your coffee’s gone cold, and you’re pretty sure you’ve forgotten something important (you have, it’s your sister’s birthday). But Harvee says your stress is… normal? What gives?
If you’ve experienced this apparent contradiction, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common questions we get from Harvee users, and the answer reveals something genuinely interesting about how our bodies work, something that even surprises researchers who study this stuff for a living.
The Tale of Two Stresses
Here’s the thing: when we say “stress” in everyday conversation, we’re usually talking about our mental or emotional state that feeling of pressure, overwhelm, or anxiety. It’s psychological stress, and it lives in our conscious experience. But your heart is tracking something different entirely.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV), the metric Harvee uses to assess your physiological stress, reflects your autonomic nervous system activity. This is the ancient, largely unconscious control system that’s been keeping humans alive for hundreds of thousands of years, managing everything from digestion to immune function to how quickly your heart beats (Shaffer & Ginsberg, 2017).
Think of it this way: your brain is the narrator of your life story, but your autonomic nervous system is the stage crew, working behind the scenes, making sure the show goes on. And here’s the fascinating part, these two don’t always agree on what’s happening.
When Your Body Knows Something You Don’t
Your autonomic nervous system responds to physiological demands, not just psychological ones. It’s reacting to things like:
- Physical recovery needs after exercise or illness.
- Sleep quality and duration from the past several nights.
- Inflammatory processes that might be ramping up before you feel sick.
- Circadian rhythm fluctuations throughout the day.
- Metabolic demands like digestion or blood sugar regulation.
- Accumulated fatigue that hasn’t reached your conscious awareness yet.
Research has shown that HRV changes can actually predict upcoming illness before you notice symptoms (Radin et al., 2020), detect overtraining in athletes before performance drops (Bellenger et al., 2016), and reveal recovery needs that don’t “feel” like stress at all. Your body might be stressed while your mind feels fine because your immune system is quietly fighting off a cold you’ll notice tomorrow. Or your parasympathetic nervous system might be working overtime to digest that massive lunch, temporarily lowering your HRV while you’re blissfully unaware, responding to emails.
The Post-Yoga Paradox
So about that elevated stress reading after your relaxing yoga class?
Intense physical activity, even the gentle-seeming kind, requires real physiological work. Your muscles need recovery. Your cardiovascular system needs to recalibrate. Your body temperature needs regulation. Deep stretching can trigger a temporary stress response as tissues adapt. All of this shows up in your HRV as your sympathetic nervous system stays partially activated to manage the recovery process (Michael et al., 2017).
You feel mentally relaxed (and you are!), but your body is busy doing maintenance. It’s like feeling satisfied after cleaning your entire house: mentally peaceful, physically tired.
The Deadline That Doesn’t Register
Now the flip side: why might you feel frantically stressed while Harvee reports low physiological stress? If you’re well-rested, properly fueled, and generally healthy, your body might handle psychological pressure remarkably well, at least in the short term. You’ve got the physiological resources to manage the acute demand. Your HRV might remain relatively stable even while your subjective experience is one of urgency or anxiety.
There’s another possibility too: if you’ve been under chronic psychological stress for a while, your body may have adapted its baseline. You’ve normalized the heightened activation. You feel stressed, but your autonomic nervous system has essentially said, “Yeah, yeah, we know. This is just how we live now.” The variability patterns might not show acute stress because this is your new normal which is actually something worth paying attention to (Kim et al., 2018).
So Which One Should I Trust?
Here’s where it gets really interesting: both. You should trust both.
Your feelings give you crucial information about your psychological state, your environment, your relationships, and your sense of control and meaning. These matter enormously for your wellbeing.
Your physiology gives you information about your body’s resource state, recovery needs, and underlying health processes that operate below conscious awareness.
The magic happens when you look at them together. When they align (feeling stressed AND showing elevated physiological stress), you know you’re experiencing a whole-system response. When they diverge, you get curious:
- “I feel fine but my HRV is low. Am I fighting something off? Do I need more sleep than I realized?”
- “I feel stressed but my HRV is good. Okay, so my body can handle this. This is psychological stress I can work with through mindset, breathing, or addressing the situation.”
The Bigger Picture
Understanding this difference isn’t just academically interesting, it’s practically useful. It helps you:
- Distinguish between mental load and physical recovery needs, so you can address what actually needs addressing.
- Catch early warning signs of illness or overtraining before they sideline you.
- Make smarter decisions about when to push and when to rest.
- Develop a more sophisticated relationship with stress, seeing it as multi-dimensional rather than simply “good” or “bad”.
Your body and mind are in constant conversation, but they’re not always talking about the same thing at the same time. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature of a remarkably complex system that’s trying to keep you healthy, safe, and functional across multiple timescales and demands.
The Takeaway
The next time Harvee’s stress reading surprises you, resist the urge to dismiss it as “wrong.” Instead, get curious. What might your body be processing that hasn’t made it to your conscious awareness? What recovery work might be happening behind the scenes?
Your feelings are valid. Your physiology is valid. And the conversation between them? That’s where the real insight lives.
After all, you wouldn’t expect your car’s dashboard and your subjective driving experience to tell you identical information: one tells you how you feel behind the wheel, the other tells you what’s happening under the hood. Both matter for a safe, smooth journey.
Your body is just doing the same thing giving you another layer of information to work with. And the more you understand both signals, the better you can take care of the whole system.
Read Between the Beats with Harvee
Ready to take your health monitoring to the next level? Harvee: Stress Monitor & Recovery Companion helps you track heart rate variability, understand stress patterns, and optimize recovery.