Is it true that we only get so many heartbeats in a lifetime? Here’s what the research shows

The famous quote says, “I think that every person has a limited number of heartbeats.” “I don’t want to waste any of mine by running around and working out.”

You might have heard this, but Neil Armstrong never said it. He also didn’t agree with it. But even though it’s a mistake, did Armstrong have a point?

Yes is the most simple answer. There is no strict way to keep track of how many times your heart beats until you’ve used up your allotment. So go outside and exercise (after you’re done reading this article).

But there is a more complicated answer that suggests there is at least some link between our heart rate and how long we will live in general.

In 2013, a group of Danish researchers published their 16 years of work on just under 5,200 men in the journal BMJ Heart.

About a third of the roughly 2,800 people who gave enough medical information to make a good database had died by the end of the trial.

When the researchers compared the resting heart rates of the sample to the rates of death, they found that a higher pulse was linked to a higher chance of dying.

People whose resting heart rate was between 71 and 80 beats per minute were 51% more likely to die during that time than people whose resting heart rate was under 50 beats per minute. This risk was doubled between 81 and 90 beats per minute. It tripled when it went over 90.

If you thought this was all about fitness or the risk of heart disease, they did think about those things. Even people who were otherwise in good shape seemed to be at risk, so don’t use this as an excuse not to go for a run.

This subtle hint at a link between life expectancy and heart rate seems to apply to more than just humans. Other animals seem to follow a similar rule of thumb.

Check out this website to see how your heart rate compares to that of, say, a giraffe.

As we’ve seen, the average heart rate for a person is somewhere between 60 and 70 beats per minute. We live about 70 years, which adds up to just over 2 billion beats.

Chickens’ hearts beat about 275 times per minute, and they only live for 15 years. Overall, they have about 2 billion beats as well.

We seem kind of lucky. A whale’s heart beats about 20 times per minute, and they only live a little bit longer than we do. It has a little less than a billion heartbeats.

An elephant? Try 30 beats per minute for 70 years, which will give you about a billion.

The poor, nervous hamster has only lived three short years, but its heart beats 450 times per minute. That is also a little less than a billion.

Since there are differences of a few million here and there, this rule is not a hard and fast one.

But if we look at it in broad terms, there does seem to be a sad connection between living fast and dying young for all animals, big and small.