🫀 When Stillness Isn’t Peace

On Low Heart Rates, Survival, and What Garmin Can’t Measure

According to my watch, I sleep well.
My resting heart rate is low — 43 beats per minute. The kind of number elite athletes brag about.
But I’m not an athlete. I barely move anymore. My life has been reduced to surviving in a room that doesn’t feel like mine.

So why does my heart beat so slowly?

Maybe because it has to.
Because my system has learned to conserve energy.
Because I have nowhere to go. Not physically, and not emotionally.
No room to flee. No safety to relax into.
Just a body that goes still.


—

Survival stillness

There’s a difference between rest and freeze.
Rest is what you feel when you’re safe — when your body softens into trust.
Freeze is what happens when there’s too much to process — and your nervous system shuts down.
Silent. Functional. But not free.

Sometimes, my heart rate shows that freeze.
Not because I feel calm — but because I’ve run out of options.
My body saves itself while my mind keeps spinning.


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Garmin knows a lot — but not everything

I use my watch to make sense of what I feel.
Sometimes it validates me. Sometimes it makes me doubt myself.
Because a “great night’s sleep” on paper can still feel like fog in my brain.
A “low stress score” can show up during moments of emotional numbness.

Maybe Garmin detects my stillness.
But it doesn’t know I have to shrink myself to exist here.
That my heart beats in a rhythm of adaptation.


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What my heart teaches me

It tells me:

> You’re still alive.
You’re saving energy.
You’re doing your best in your own way.



And that is a kind of strength too.
Not the strength of performing or pushing through.
But the quiet strength of surviving what isn’t yet safe.