What does your heart actually experience when you watch live sports? A recent article in Scientific American warns, “Watching a game can raise your blood pressure and heart rate.”
But, just as there are “good and bad” cholesterol, there are different types of heart rate elevation. Healthy elevation occurs during exercise: our heart rate increases, blood surges through the circulatory system, and this usually enhances our health.
Unhealthy elevation is triggered when the heart races due to mental or emotional strain, while the body remains stationary. Unlike exercise, the extra energy pumped by the heart delivers the brain and body with the energy needed to overcome stress. This elevated heart rate serves as a "signal" and should not be ignored. But how can we detect this signal and be alerted?"
Now, a newly developed App by renowned researchers at the University of Memphis provides an answer. CuesHub’s Workload Heart Rate (WLHR) measures the unhealthy elevation in heart rate due to strain. Unique to the measurement, the app filters out increases in heart rate attributable to activity such as walking or climbing, thereby excluding this effect from the Workload Heart Rate measure. Full disclosure, we serve as advisors to the app development project.
During the Super Bowl game window (5:30–9 PM CT), researchers analyzed collective data from approximately 100 users (some of whom were watching the game). What they discovered was something remarkable.
On average, across 210 minutes of game time, 43 minutes (20%) reflected mental strain among app users. This finding stands out compared with typical Sundays, on which the same users experienced only 21 minutes of mental strain (10%). In other words, mental strain time doubled on Super Bowl Sunday.
A case in point is me (Manoj Jain}. I am a die-hard New England Patriots fan, influenced by my upbringing in Boston and by proudly wearing an official Tom Brady Jersey, which I donned for good luck (unsuccessfully) during the game.
On Super Bowl Sunday, my average strain time climbed to 78 minutes, compared with 21 minutes on a typical Sunday. So clearly something different was happening.
More interestingly, if we extrapolate to only one-third of the US population - the estimated number who watch the game - we observe a three-and-a-half-fold increase in minutes of strain (95 vs. 28 minutes). between Super Bowl Sunday and a typical Sunday among those who had the highest minutes of strain during the game window.
Although this is not a published scientific study, the individual-level data reveal valuable insight into physiological processes across different periods of the day.
If you are interested in your minutes of strain during the Super Bowl game and you were wearing your Apple Watch, you can download the CuesHub app and uncover your “WorkLoad heart rate” from that day.
The aim is not to reduce sports viewing, but to enhance awareness of how our bodies respond during moments of rest, calm, activity, and workload strain. While Super Bowl Sunday may trigger excitement, an elevated workload heart rate signals physiological stress that deserves attention.
Dr. Manoj Jain is a Memphis-based infectious disease specialist and adjunct faculty member at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta. He writes about various issues.
Source: Commercial Appeal