Heart Rate and Resting Heart Rate

Alongside HRV—the variation in time between beats—another common measure is heart rate (HR). They describe different features of the same heartbeat record and are both affected by context and measurement conditions. This page explains how to read heart rate and resting heart rate without turning one number into a diagnosis.

What is a normal resting heart rate?

There is no single value that can determine whether an individual is healthy. A wearable study of more than 90,000 adults found large between-person differences and associations with age, sex, sleep, BMI, and season (Quer et al., 2020). A value must be interpreted with symptoms, context, medication, rhythm, and an appropriate clinical assessment when needed.

Why is my resting heart rate high?

A morning value higher than your usual can coincide with short sleep, alcohol, physical activity, illness, psychological arousal, medication, temperature, or measurement differences. The value alone cannot identify which factor caused it (Quer et al., 2020).

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, beat intervals can follow different patterns. HR describes average rate; HRV summarizes interval variation with a defined metric and recording protocol. Neither establishes “how your body is doing right now” on its own.

At group level, exercise often raises HR and can temporarily alter HRV. Slow paced breathing can also change both measurements. The direction and size are not identical in every person, and the pattern does not diagnose stress or recovery.

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 an estimate of beats per minute under resting conditions. Training status can be associated with lower RHR at group level, but a lower value is not automatically better. Similar measurement conditions make personal comparisons easier.

• 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)

There is no single RHR value that can confirm health. Values differ widely, and symptoms, rhythm, context, medication, and measurement quality still matter.

A morning that's higher than usual

A morning RHR higher than usual can coincide with sleep, alcohol, activity, temperature, illness, medication, stress, or measurement conditions. It does not identify fatigue or a cause by itself.

Do not judge things as good or bad from a single day's number. RHR naturally rises and falls. Review a trend over several days alongside sleep, activity, alcohol, medication, fever, and other context. A change alone cannot tell you that a specific action—such as rest or a breathing exercise—is required (Quer et al., 2020).

A lower-than-usual morning value also has several possible explanations and does not prove that recovery is complete.

It differs by morning, day, and night

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

• During sleep … often lower for many people, while still varying with sleep stage, breathing, and health
• 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)

Resting records can be easier to compare than activity records. Feelmo does not publish its processing details.

How Feelmo handles it

Feelmo shows HR and HRV records where permission and availability allow, alongside its proprietary Balance score (0–100). Balance summarizes available HRV-derived information and patterns in your own past with unpublished processing. The processing details are not public.

Balance is not a medical scale or a ranking against other people. Its six companion faces are product interface characters whose display rules are not public, not measurements of emotion, fatigue, stress, recovery, or health.

The detailed calculation is proprietary and not published. See Balance score for interpretation, Understanding HRV for measurement science, and Aging, sex, and individual differences for population variability.

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.