Heart Rate and Resting Heart Rate

Alongside HRV (the "fluctuation" in your heartbeat), another fundamental measure is your heart rate (HR). Even though both look at the same heart, they tell you completely different things. On this page, we'll walk through how to read your heart rate and resting heart rate, gently and with sources. There's no need to overthink it — all that matters is "how am I doing compared to my usual self?"

Heart rate and HRV are different

• Heart rate (HR) … how many times your heart beats per minute. The "speed" at any given moment
• HRV … how much the intervals between beats fluctuate. The "way it wavers"

Even at the same 60 bpm, one heart may beat as regularly as a clock, while another softly stretches and contracts in time with your breath. HR is speed, HRV is suppleness — two windows that complement each other. With only one of them, you can see only half of how your body is doing right now.

For example, right after exercise or when you're tense, HR tends to rise while HRV tends to fall. As you breathe slowly and settle down, HR comes down and HRV widens again. When you look at the two side by side, you can see "speed" and "suppleness" moving together.

Figure: Heart rate usually falls during sleep and rises during the day. The dashed line represents a person's resting heart rate (RHR). This figure is illustrative and does not show actual measurements.

Resting heart rate (RHR)

Your resting heart rate (RHR) is the number of beats per minute when you're at rest. In general, a well-trained heart tends to beat more slowly. Times when your body is calm — during sleep, or in the morning before you've started moving — give you a good reference value.

• A meta-analysis of large cohort studies has reported an association between a higher resting heart rate and an increased risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality (Zhang et al., 2016)
• RHR measured daily with wearables shows large individual differences and has been shown to vary with age, sex, sleep, BMI, season, and more (Quer et al., 2020)

In other words, there's no single "correct" answer like "a healthy person's RHR is XX." Some people sit at 50 bpm and others at 70 bpm, and both can be perfectly healthy.

A morning that's higher than usual

A morning when your resting heart rate is higher than usual can sometimes be a sign of lack of sleep, fatigue, a change in condition, alcohol, or stress. It may be your body whispering, "I might be pushing myself a little."

That said, please don't judge things as good or bad from a single day's number. RHR naturally rises and falls from day to day. Look at it as a trend over several days, and if it feels like "it's been on the high side for the past few days," let that be a cue for some gentle care — resting a little, going to bed early, or breathing slowly (Quer et al., 2020).

Conversely, on a morning when you've slept well and recovered, your RHR may come out lower than usual. The "waves" of rising and falling themselves are an honest record of your body.

It differs by morning, day, and night

Heart rate changes with a rhythm over the course of a day, too.

• During sleep … lowest for most people, a sign that the body is resting
• During the day … rises with activity, conversation, caffeine, travel, and so on
• During exercise or tension … rises sharply for a while (this is a natural response)

The reason Feelmo gives more weight to your resting values when calculating your baseline is that they're less swayed by these daytime fluctuations and more clearly reflect "your usual you."

How Feelmo handles it

Feelmo reads both HR and HRV as background information for your Balance score (0–100).

The Balance score itself is built mainly around HRV (the fluctuation of your heartbeat) — not a single public metric, but multiple HRV-derived clues together with measurement quality. HR and resting heart rate are added as supporting signs that help you understand your body's state for the day in a more three-dimensional way. Rather than treating any single number as absolute, the idea is to gently watch over "the present you" through several windows.

The Balance score is a number from 0 to 100, but it isn't meant to rank you by points. You read it not against other people, but against your usual self. And because a bare number can make us tense up, Feelmo translates it into the expressions of six companions (Lively, Calm, Neutral, Anxious, Overwhelmed, and Tired) and sets them beside you as gentle words of observation — never as a verdict.

How we integrate which measures, and the specific formula that combines them into a single score, lies at the heart of our proprietary Feelmo analysis logic, and is kept confidential as a trade secret. For the big picture of the thinking behind it, see Balance score, and for related topics, see Understanding HRV and Aging, sex, and individual differences.

References

1. Zhang D, Shen X, Qi X. Resting heart rate and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in the general population: a meta-analysis. CMAJ. 2016;188(3):E53–E63.
2. Quer G, Gouda P, Galarnyk M, Topol EJ, Steinhubl SR. Inter- and intraindividual variability in daily resting heart rate and its associations with age, sex, sleep, BMI, and time of year: Retrospective, longitudinal cohort study of 92,457 adults. PLoS One. 2020;15(2):e0227709.
3. Umetani K, Singer DH, McCraty R, Atkinson M. Twenty-four hour time domain heart rate variability and heart rate: relations to age and gender over nine decades. Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 1998;31(3):593–601.