🫀 When Stillness Isn’t Peace

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

According to my watch, I have good nights. 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.

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.


What my heart teaches me. It tells me: I’m still alive. I’m saving energy. I’m 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.