Mayer waves
Also called Mayer wave, 0.1 Hz rhythm, 10-second rhythm
Slow waves in blood pressure and heart rate, about one every 10 seconds (0.1 Hz), made by the delay in the blood-pressure reflex. They are the main rhythm in the LF band at rest.
If you record blood pressure and heart rate at rest, you see two waves on top of each other. The faster one follows your breathing. The slower one rises and falls about every 10 seconds whatever you do with your breath. That slower wave is called a Mayer wave.
It comes from the baroreflex Baroreflex The reflex that steadies blood pressure from beat to beat by changing heart rate. Its built-in delay makes heart rate rise and fall about every 10 seconds, the 0.1 Hz rhythm in LF power. More about Baroreflex . The reflex corrects blood pressure with a delay of a few seconds, so each correction overshoots a little and the next one pulls back. Quigley and colleagues (2024) put the centre of the rhythm at about 0.1 Hz, once every 10 seconds, and Shaffer, McCraty and Zerr (2014) tie a resonance at that frequency to the delay in the reflex loop.
Why it matters for HRV. In a spectrum, the Mayer wave is the peak inside the LF LF power The variance of the heartbeat intervals that falls in the 0.04 to 0.15 Hz band, in ms²: rhythms repeating every 7 to 25 seconds. Once read as sympathetic activity, which is now disputed. More about LF power band (0.04 to 0.15 Hz). The teaching recording on this site has one at 0.1 Hz next to the breathing peak at 0.25 Hz; you can see both in the spectrum below at 15 breaths a minute. Slow your breathing to 6 a minute and the breathing peak moves onto the Mayer wave. The two add up, which is the resonance HRV biofeedback HRV biofeedback A breathing practice in which you watch your heart rate live and breathe slowly, often near 6 breaths a minute, to make the heart's rise and fall with each breath as large as possible. More about HRV biofeedback uses (Lehrer and Gevirtz, 2014), and LF power jumps without any change in stress.
Where your breathing lands in the spectrum
A teaching model, not a recording
- Breathing peak
- 0.25 Hz
- HF power
- 635 ms²
- LF power
- 120 ms²
- LF/HF
- 0.19
- HF, normalised
- 84 nu
At 15 breaths a minute the breathing peak sits at 0.25 Hz, inside the HF band. HF power is 635 ms² and LF/HF is 0.19.
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A filled spectrum from 0 to 0.5 Hz with the VLF, LF and HF bands shaded and a vertical line at 0.15 Hz. At 15 breaths a minute the tallest peak is at 0.25 Hz, inside HF, with a smaller peak at 0.1 Hz from the blood-pressure rhythm. Slide down to 6 breaths a minute and the breathing peak moves to 0.1 Hz, merges with the blood-pressure peak and towers over the rest, while the HF band empties. Readouts give the peak frequency, LF and HF power, LF/HF and HF in normalised units.
The page on the baroreflex explains where the rhythm comes from.
Sources
- A healthy heart is not a metronome: an integrative review of the heart's anatomy and heart rate variability
- Heart rate variability biofeedback: how and why does it work?
- Publication guidelines for human heart rate and heart rate variability studies in psychophysiology—Part 1: Physiological underpinnings and foundations of measurement