What hummingbird heartbeats can teach us about our lives

As much as hummingbirds feed on flowers’ nectar, it seems they don’t actually have time to stop and smell the roses. :(

In a previous post, we learnt that hummingbird hearts beat incredibly fast while they’re awake, but slow down by 95% - 99.96% while they rest in a state of torpor.

The hearts of most animal are wired in to put in about the same amount of effort - no matter how fast or slow they beat. Most creatures on earth have about about 1-1.5 billion heartbeats to their names.

Image credit: National Today

Here’s some examples:

For mice, their hearts beat around 500-700bpm. We’ll take 500, to account for the lower heart rate when they rest. 1440 minutes a day, 365 days a year (too lazy to count leap years) and 5 years of life = 1.3 billion heart rates for a mouse heart.

For hummingbirds, their hearts beat around 1200bpm in flight, 250bpm at rest, and 50bpm wile asleep. After calculations for its 7-year life, that’s around 1.26 billion beats.

Human hearts seem to be a little above average, and most humans die after 2 to 3 billion heartbeats. This is probably because of advances in our standard of living, and in healthcare. In the past, the average lifespan was a lot shorter than ours today!

For a human heart rate of 70bpm (mine sits at around 63bpm) while awake, 60bpm while sleeping, for 70 years old: in equals to 2.45 billion heartbeats.

The same calculations work for slower animals, too. Let’s take the Aldabra Giant Tortoise as an example: at 19bpm for 1440 minutes a day, 365 days, 120 years = 1.2 billion.

(A recipe for success: lower your heart rate, and you’ll live a longer life!)

The pace of life in large cities affect our heartbeats, and our lives

So what can hummingbird heartbeats can teach us about our lives?

In simple terms, there’s a theory that, as the pace of life, and our average heart rates, speed up, the length of our lives go down.

Science has shown that the pace of life in large cities such as New York City and Tokyo correlate to the speed you walk on said city’s sidewalk. (If you visit a new city and notice that everyone’s walking really quickly, that’s a sure sign the pace of living there is hectic!)

A 2007 study puts this difference in pace of walking and living in perspective: residents of Singapore averaged 10.5 seconds to cover 60 feet (or 18 metres). For Bahrain, it was 18 seconds, and for Malawi, it was 31 seconds - more than triple the amount a time a Singaporean would have taken! And with the pace of life speeding up, stressed-out people are walking 10% faster than their counterparts, just a decade ago.

Image credit: Bloomberg. The correlation between walking speed and population was strikingly linear. With only a couple exceptions, people in places like Brooklyn, New York (pop: 2.6 million), walked faster than those in places like Psychro, Greece (pop: 365). The analysis indicated not only that life moves faster in the city than in the countryside, but that "pace of life varies in a regular fashion with the size of the local population, regardless of the cultural setting.”

While efficiency is great, we should look at hummingbirds as an example of why accelerating without limit maybe isn’t a good idea.

Image credit: Chantecaille

Living in the fast lane comes with a price

As we’ve learnt, hummingbirds are slaves to their speed. If they rest without feeding (or without entering a state of torpor), they’ll die. They’ve lost the ability to walk, since their legs have shriveled up into such small, hollow things. They are fiercely territorial since it requires so much food to keep them alive, and that means they don’t even have the chance to slow down, partner up and raise a family.

And in humans, chronic stress is actually linked to a higher risk for heart-related diseases such as stroke and heart attack. And worse - weight gain! (Actually I’m kidding, I have a much healthier relationship with weight gain now, so it doesn’t scare me anymore, but I know plenty of young people who still fear weight gain. To that I just want to say: We’re all on a journey to appreciating ourselves. Your body is worth much more than just the way you look. While I hope you achieve your weight goals, I also hope you won’t be too harsh on yourself when doing so!)

One single blog post isn’t going to be enough to get you guys started on a wellness journey, but I hope your take-away from this newsletter about the fantastical, brilliant hummingbirds, is: to slow down and smell the roses!

If you have the time, when you finish this post, take 5 deep breaths in, and out, for 6 counts each. (Count to 6 as you breathe in, and then count to 6 as you breathe out.)