How to Breathe Correctly for Optimal Health, Mood, Learning & Performance
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm ander huberman and am a professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today, we are discussing breathing. Breathing is something that we are all familiar with because, Frankly, we are all doing IT right now, and we do IT during our waking states.

And while we are sleep, and most of us have probably heard that breathing is essential to life, we hear that we can survive without food for some period of time, maybe even up to a month or more, that we can't survive that long without water, but we can survive a few days without water, depending on how well hydrated ted we are when we go into that water deprivation and the heat of the environment we happen to be in. But that we cannot survive without breathing for more than a few minutes. And then if we cease to breathe, that our brain and our bodily tissues will die.

And in fact, that is true. However, despite everybody's knowledge that reading is essential to life, I don't think that most people realized just how important how we breathe is to our quality of life. And that includes our mental health, our physical health and what we call performance. That is our ability to tap into skills, either physical or cognitive, in ways that we would not be able to otherwise if we are not breathing correctly.

So today, we are going to talk about what IT is to breathe correctly, both at rest during sleep, in order to reduce our levels of stress, in order to wake up or to become more alert deliberately, and many, many other things, including how to stop, kick up in. This is one of the most searched four topics on the internet today. I will teach you the one method that is actually linked to science.

No, IT does not involve drinking a glass of water backwards from the opposite side of the cup or holding your breath in any kind of esoteric way. IT actually relates to the neural mechanisms, that is, the brain body connections that cause the hiccup. P hick.

Up is a spasm of that neural circuit. And i'll teach you, had to turn off that neural circuit in one try. And that's not a technic I developed.

It's a technique that actually been known about for several centuries, and we now know the underline mechanism. So today's discussion will give to you many tools that you can apply. All of these tools are, of course, behavioral al tools. They're completely zero cost. And in telling you how those tools work, you'll learn a lot about how the breathing A K, the respiratory system works, and how IT interfaces with the other organs and tissues of the body, in particular the brain.

In fact, one of the most important things to understand about reading right here at the outset is that breathing is unique among brain and bodily functions, and that IT lies at the interface between our conscious and our subconscious behavior. And IT represents a bridge literally, in the brain between the conscious and the subconscious. What do I mean by that? Well, breathing does not require that we pay attention to our breathing or that we are even aware that we are breathing IT will just Carry on in the background, either Normally or abNormally.

And i'll teach you what Normal and abNormal breathing is in a little bit. However, breathing is unique among brain and bodily functions in that at any moment we can consciously take control of how we breath. This is an absolutely spectacular and highly unusual feature of brain function.

For instance, your digestion is Carrying on in the background right now, whether not you've had food recently or not, but you can't simply control your digestion by thinking about IT in a particular way. In fact, most people can't even control their thinking by trying to control their thinking. That actually takes some practice.

IT can be done topic for a future episode. However, breathing is unique. Breathing will Carry on involuntarily, subconsciously in the background, as I said before.

But if at any moment you want to hold your brother in hell more deeply, vigorously, or x hail longer than you inhale, you can do that. Very few, if any, other neural circuits in your brain and body allow that level of control. And turns out that level of control is not an accident.

IT has been hypothesized that by controlling breathing, the brain is actually attempting to control its own state of mind. Now, the way this was originally stated in a scientific research paper was a little a bit different as a little bit more physiological. The statement was, the brain, by regulating breathing, controls its own excitability.

Excitability, in the context of neurobiology is how able the brain is to take a new information or not, how able the brain is or not to turn itself off, to go to sleep and to regulate its own levels of anxiety. Focus at sara, if that seems a little bit abstract, i'll make IT simple for you. By changing your pattern of breathing, you can very quickly change what your brain is capable of doing.

In fact, little bit later, i'll tell you that while you inhale l you are far Better at learning and remembering information than during an XL. And IT is a very significant difference. Does that mean you should only in the hill and not XL? No, of course not. I'll teach you how to breathe for the sake of learning and memory, as well as for physical performance and a number of other things.

So hope fully, i've been able to highlight for you the importance of breathing, not just for life, because, yes, breathing is essential for life, but that the subtle ties of how we breathe, the duration and intensity of our in hails and our exhales, how long we hold our breath between inhales and x sales, very critically defines our state of mind and our state of body, what we are able to do and what we are not able to do. And the great news we can control our breathing and in doing so, control our mental health, physical health and performance. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford.

IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsor of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element.

Element is an electoral light drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium in patache, this so called electronic and no sugar. Now, salt, magnesium and potash are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons.

In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electronics need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electronic light concentrations or dehydration of the body lead to deficits. And cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back electorate ratio of one thousand milligrams, that one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of potassium and sixty milligrams of magnesium.

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Let's talk about breathing. And of course, we breath in order to bring oxygen into the body, but we also breathe to remove certain things from our body, in particular carbon oxide. So the main players in today's discussion are going to be oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Now a common misconception is that oxygen is good and carbon dioxide is bad and simply not the case when it's just take a step back from that statement. And let's think about this. When we breathe in, we are largely breathing in air in order to bring oxygen tire body.

And we can just stop right there and say, why do we breathe at all? Why can't we just get oxygen from the world around as well? It's because oxygen an can't defuse through our skin into the deeper cells of our body.

Other single cell and very simple organisms can actually bring oxygen into their system without the need to breathe. But we have to breathe in order to bring oxygen to the cells that reside deep in our body, in particular our brain cells, which are the most metabolite active cells. Our body require a lot of oxygen, and those brain cells are sitting course in the brain, which is in case in the crony vault, the skull.

And so oxygen can simply passed to those cells that we need to have a system that will deliver oxygen. Those cells. We also need a system which turns out to be the breathing, a respiratory system that can offload or remove the gas that we call carbon dioxide, not because common dioxide is bad, but because too much of IT in our system is not good.

In fact, much of today's discussion will also sent around the common misconception that carbon oxide is something that we want to get rid of. You don't want to get rid of too much carbon oxide, or else you can't actually get oxygen to the cells and issues of your body in an efficient way. So you need oxygen and you need carbon dioxide in your body. You also need to be able to upload or remove carmody oxide and bringing oxygen in the correct ratios so that you can perform the kind of mental functions and physical functions that you want to. So we just dial out even further.

We say, what are the key components of breathing? What are the elements within the body that allow us to bring oxyde to the tissues and cells as is required, and remove carbon oxide from the body as is required, yet keep enough carbon oxide around in order to allow oxygen to do its thing? Well, that breathing or respiratory apparatus has two major components, and i'm going to just briefly describe those.

And as I do this, I really want to highlight the fact that anytime you're thinking about biology and physiology in particular, whether not about the brain or the liver or the gott microbiome, it's useful to category things either as mechanical mechanisms or chemical mechanisms. What do I mean by that? Let's just take the analogy of hunger. There are mechanical mechanisms that tell us when we should eat.

For instance, you have neurons, nerve cells in your gut, that signal how stretched or non stretched the walls of your stomach car, right, how full or how empty your gut is, and send that information to the brain to make you feel, to some extent, hungry or not hungry in general, when our stomach is very full, and especially if it's very distended, even with liquid IT suppresses our hunger. Whereas when our stomach is devoid of that mechanical pressure, especially for a number of hours, IT tends to trigger hunger by signaling. Via neurons to the brain.

In addition, there are chemical signals that go from the gut to the brain for insincere. We have neurons in our gut that can detect the presence of a mino assets from proteins that we eat, fatty assets from the foods that we eat, the lipids and sugars, different forms of carbon hydrate. The neurons in our gut are paying attention to or respond to how much a mino acid, fatty acid and carbo hydra is in our gut and send signals to the brain to either stimulate or suppress hunger.

So those are chemical signals that are being passed from gut to brain. And they work in parallel with the mechanical signals. And this idea of in parallel with, again, is a very common team.

And biology, especially neuroscience, the term parallel pathways referred to the fact that anytime there's a critical bodily function, it's very unlikely that just one type of information, like just mechanical information, is going to be used almost always. It's going to be mechanical and chemical information. I could pick a number of other examples.

For instance, if you want to avoid damaging your skin or other tissues of your body, which is essential to life, well, then you have mechanical information about, for instance, whether not something is pinching or ready to pierce your skin. That's mechanical information that sent via specific neurons up to the brain to signal a retraction reflects of you move your lib away from wherever that intense pressure is coming. You also have chemical sensing in your skin, the presence of things that illicit a burn, or that illicit h or that illicit extreme cold.

All that chemical information is being signal up to the brain as well in parallel. So parallel pathways is a common theme. Someone we're thinking about the aspiration, A K, the breathing system. We also need to look at the mechanical system.

What are the different components of the nose them out, the ones that said, a, that allow oxygen to be brought in and common oxide to be removed from the body, but not too much carbon docks ever removed, to allow breathing to work as efficiently and as optimates as possible. And then we also need to look at the chemical systems of the longs, the bloodstream, and how different cells use oxygen and carbon oxide in order to understand that as well. If you can understand the mechanical and chemical aspects of breathing, even just at a top countour.

Well, then the various tools that I discussed during today's episode, such as ability to calm yourself down most quickly by doing what's called a physiological sigh, or go to this in more detail a little bit. But this is two very deep and hills through the nose. So the first one is a long in hill, and then the second one after that is a quick, sharp in hill to maximum inflate your lungs, followed by a full XL through the mouth to longs completely empty.

So it's big in hl through the nose than short in hell through the nose. Immediately after that, in order to maximum inflated the lungs, and then a long excel through the mouth until your lungs are empty, you will understand why that particular pattern of breathing, and not simply one inhale, we're not simply in an inhale through the nose. And an excel through the nose as well, is optimal for reducing your stress quickly.

That double in hill through the nose, followed by a long excel through the mouth, works to reduce your levels of stress and lower your levels of so called autonomic rosel very fast in real time. And IT works Better than any other known approach. It's not a hack.

This is actually something that your body has specific neural circuits to do, and I actually performs during sleep on a regular basis and even throughout the day, and that you can put form voluntarily. And IT works so well to reduce stress very quickly, not because IT brings in the maxi amount of oxygen and removes the maxim amount of carbon oxide, but rather because IT optimates baLances oxygen and carbon oxide. If you understand the mechanical and chemical aspects of breathing, then you will understand exactly why that particular pattern of breathing, the so called physiological side, is the most efficient way to rapidly reduce stress in real time.

If you can understand the mechanical and chemical aspects of breathing, you will also understand why most people are over breathing, that is, their breathing too often. Even if they're breathing in a shallow manner, they're breathing too often, and they are blowing off for removing too much carbon dioxide. And if you understand that carbon dioxide is critical for the way the oxygen is delivered from the bloodstream to the tissues of the body, including the brain, well then I will make very good sense as to why people who are breathing too much don't actually experience all the effects of elevated oxygen, but rather they're putting their body into what's called a hypoxic state.

They're not getting enough oxygen to the tissues of their body, in particular their brain. And this is true not just for people who are obese or who suffer from sleep opening, or although that's certainly the case, but for people that have believed or not, certain personality types will talk about breathing and personality type, and actually how breathing has been shown to alter personality. That's right.

Breathing can alter personality in positive ways that allow anyone to show up to the various social and non social endeavors of their life with more calm, more focus, alertness and improve their overall health. okay. So let's talk about the mechanical components of breathing. It's really quite simple. You've got your nose, obviously, and you've got your mouth.

And a little bit later will talk about the incredible advantages of being a nasal breathing most of the time, but also the incredible advantages of using your mouth to breathe, both for inhales nx sales during particular types of endeavors will get back to that later. But for the meantime, the only two ways to bring area into your system are through your nose and through your mouth. We also have the larrick, which is a rigid tissue, or pipe, that brings the air from the nose and mouth down to the lungs.

Now that word rigid is really important here, because what we will soon learn is that your lungs basically act like a pump. You sort of know this already, but these are two big bags basically that can fill with air, or that can freeze air out. What most people don't realize is that the lungs are not just too big bags of air.

Your lungs are actually two big bags air. That inside of them have hundreds of millions of little sacks that are called the AV of the lungs. And by having those hundreds of millions of little sex, you increase the surface area of the lungs.

And by increasing the surface area, you allow more oxygen to pass from the air in your lungs into the bloodstream. Then if you didn't have those sacks, and you allow more carbon dioxide to move from the bloodstream into those sex and lungs. And then when you exile, the carbon dioxide can be removed.

okay? So those little sex we call evil of the lungs are an important part of the mechanical aspect of breathing. Will get to a little bit later.

okay? So at the first past, the mechanical aspects of breathing are really straightfor, right? You get, you can break through your nose.

You can be through your mouth because downside, the learning, I told you, the learning is a rigid pipe. The lungs are not rigid. They can expand and they can contract like a pump to bring an air or to expelled air.

Now keep in mind that the lungs do not have any muscles themselves, so we need muscles that can either squeeze the logs or that will allow the lungs to expand. And there are two general groups of muscles that do that, and they are the dire frame and the so called intercostal muscles. The diagram is a thin muscle that sits below the lungs and above the liver.

And when we in hail, provided that we are using what's called diatoms atic breathing, that dire frame contracts. And when IT contracts, IT moves down, which allows more space for the lungs to inflate with her. Now, the intercostal muscles are the muscles between our ribs, a number of people that probably don't realize this.

But your ribs, of course, are bone. But in between those bone, you have muscles and the inter costal muscles when you inhale contract. And that allows your rib cage to move up into, expand a bit.

And I think, again, people probably don't realize that your ribs are not fixed in place. They can actually further and closer apart from one another. So when you inhale, your red cage actually moves up.

Sometimes the shoulder will move up as well, and that's because those intercostal muscles are contracting. Now muscles can't move on their own. They are controlled by nerves. So we've got to nose the mouth, the learning in the lungs. The lungs have all those, all evil in them.

And as I told you, we've got the dire frame as a muscle to move the long's, and we have the intercostal muscles to move the ribs, which can allow the lungs to expand. Again, we're just on the mechanical components of breathing. But because muscles can't move themselves, you should be asking what moves the muscles.

And it's really nerves that control muscles. So when they are not, you're contracting your bye ABS or you're walking in your contracting your quadra PS and your hamstrings and your cafe muscles, it's neurons, nerve cells that control that. There is a specialized nerve called the french nerve P H R E N I C Frank nerve, that comes out of the neck.

And when I say IT comes out of the neck, what I mean is that they're little neurons that resides in the brain stem in the back of your brain. And they send little wires that we call axon down and out of the neck. They go through close to the heart and a little bit behind IT.

And they go down. And they form synapses, as that is, they form connections with the diagram, me. And when those neurons released neurotransmitter atal chemicals, the direction contracts and IT moves down.

So we say that the french nerve is a motor nerve, is designed to move muscle. However, the french nerve, like a few other nerves in the body, is interesting in that IT has not just motor nerves in there, neurons that control the contraction of muscles. IT also can sense things that has sensory neons.

So IT also sends connections down to the diagram and actually down deep into the direction and close to the liver. And know that I said, deliver twice. Smell already.

We're going to get back to this later when we talk about physical movement and cramps of the body, those century neurons dive deep into the diagram and then they go back up to the brain and they allow you to sense where the dial frame is. So they're giving information about where the diagram is in your body. Now most of the time you're not paying attention to this, but right now you can actually try this, and I would encourage you to do this.

Diaper atic breathing is in many ways, the ideal way to breathe, and that is the most. Facial way to breathe. We talk about what we mean exactly when we say breathing efficiency later, but the dire frame is designed to allow the lungs to expand or to contract the lungs to bring iron to the body or to remove carbon oxide from the body.

And if you want to know whether not you're using diatoms, atic breathing is very simple. If you inhale, probably best to do this through the knows, but you could do IT through the mouth if you inhale, and your belley moves outward on the in hill. Well, then that french nervous controlling your diagram properly, and then when you excel, your belly should go in just a little bit.

That's a diao matic breathing. Now dialog atic breathing is talked about in the context of yoga. It's often talked about as a way, calm down and so on, but distrmar breathing is just one mode by which your brain and the french nerve can control muscle. The diagram m to control the mechanical aspects of the lungs to bring an air and excell air.

So I mention before you also have these muscles between your ribs or the inter costal muscles, and there's a separate set of nerves that allow those muscles to contraction, for your rib cage, to expand in order to create more room, for your lungs to get larger and fill with air, or for your reach to contract a bit when those muscles relax in order to excel air. I'd like to go on record by saying that there is no rule that dialer atic breathing is Better, then breathing where your ribcage moves. This is a common mist conception.

People say, oh, you know, if your shoulder are going up and down and your your rib cage is moving while you're breathing well, then you're not breathing, right? And if your belley goes out and the rest of your body is still while you breath well, then you're breathing correctly. I know of zero five zero minus one data to support that statement.

You have multiple parallel mechanisms to control the mechanics of your lungs and for breathing. And when you're exerting yourself very hard, you tend to use both the intercostal muscles and your ribcage moving as well as your diagram m in order to bring in a lot of oxygen into offload a lot of carbon oxide in. When you're common, Frankly, you could use diplomatic breathing, or you could use rid cage type breathing in order to bring enough oxygen.

Entire system. There's no real data showing that dithering tic breathing is somehow Better or worse. However, being able to mechanically control those independently or to combine them and use them together is of tremendous power toward regulating your mental and physical states.

We'll talk about how to do that a little bit later. For right now, please understand that you have these different mechanical components that allow you to bring oxygen into your system and to excell air, and to thereby all flow carbon oxide from your system. Again, we haven't talked about the gas exchange of carbon oxide and oxygen and how that happening.

The blood swim will talk about that next. But the basic mechanical components are pretty simple, right? Once again, just to review its nose, mouth, larrance, lungs, evy only within the lungs, and then those two muscles, the die for me, and inter costal muscles of the ribs. One thing I failed to mention is why it's so important that that learnings be rigid. That is a tube that is very rigid.

And the reason for that is that unlike the lungs, which you want to act to sort of A A below pump where you can, you can deflate IT and inflate IT in order to move air in and out, the lyrics needs to be rigid so that IT doesn't collapse while you're bringing air in and out. You can imagine that if IT was a very flimsy tuber, or the walls of the larrance were very flimsy and thin, well, then you can imagine breathing in very vigorously and IT would shut like a tube, a that suddenly flats on itself, which is would not be good. So the fact that the laren's rigid is actually a very crucial part of this whole system.

The other important aspect of this system is IT relates to the mechanics of breathing, is the fact that your nose in your mouth have different resistances to air. You can probably notice this right now if you were IT, for instance, breathing through your mouth and only through your mouth, this is breathing through your nose. Some of you perhaps have a harder time breathing through your nose.

By the way, it's perfectly Normal that one or the other nostril would be harder to be through or easier to be through, and that that switches across the day as to do with the flow of mucus and rebo spinal fu and entertaining IO pressure. Totally Normal. Many people out there, I think they have a deviated symptom who don't actually have a deviated symptom a little bit.

I will talk about how to repair deviated symptom without surgery because that actually is possible in many, not all cases, and is immensely beneficial to do. But what we know is that breathing in through the nose is a little bit harder. And it's supposed to be a little bit harder, however, because it's a little bit harder because there's more resistance, as we say, you are actually able to draw more force into these mechanical aspects of the breathing apparatus and actually bring more air into your lungs.

You can try this right now. Try breathing in through your mouth to maximum inflate your lungs, and try to do IT through mostly diatomic tic breathing, just for sake of example. In other words, try and breathe through your mouth and as you do that, have your belly expand and maximum inflate your lungs. I'll do IT right now with you so that we can do IT in together and I can prove to everyone that um i'm just as deficient in this as you are. Okay, so I can inflate my stomach doing that.

But now try doing IT with your nose and please do excel before you try doing IT with your nose with your nose you're onna feel more resistance, but you'll notice that you can inflame IT quite a bit further, and you'll feel your entire cavity, your belly, and maybe even in your lower back. So I fill with some pressure. So the increased resistance actually allows you to draw more air into the system.

This turns out to be very important. And IT also wipe away a common mist conception, which is, if you're somebody who has chAllenges breathing through your nose, that somehow you should avoid breathing in through your nose. Actually, quite the opposite is true. And we can go step further and say that if you have chAllenges breathing in through your nose, chances are that because the increased resistance of breathing in three, your nose provided is not completely included, is going to allow you to bring more oxygen into your system.

This will turn out to be useful later when we explore different techniques for you, since not just to calm down quickly, but to elevate your energy quickly, to remove a crap turing exercise and a number of other things that breathing can be used for that can be immensely useful for mental and physical chAllenges. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.

I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring in the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic Greens once, or usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for good health. Our god is very important, is populated by got microbiome that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health.

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So now let's talk about the chemical aspects of breathing. And the two major players in this discussion are oxygen, which all the cells and tissues of your body need, and carbon dioxide, which all the cells and tissues of your body need. In fact, carbon dioxide plays critical roles in delivering oxygen to your cells.

And without comedy oxide, you're not going to get enough oxygen to the cells and dishes of your body. That said, if carbon oxide levels are too high, that is very problem. And in fact, one of the ways that one can reliably induce panic in anybody is to have them breathe air that contains too much carbon oxide.

So much so that for people that lack are so called amiga. Many of you probably heard of the amiga a. This is a brain area that's associated with fear and threat detection, even in people who completely lack a idlers on both sides of the brain, because they were removed, because they apple optic seizure there.

And therefore, those people are completely unafraid of things that they ought to be afraid of, like hides, poisonous snakes, any number of different things dangerous to humans. Well, if those people breathe and excess amount of crobble oxide, they immediately have a panic attack. What that tells us is that, again, there are parallel mechanisms.

There's a redundancy in the system to protect ourselves from having too much carbon dioxide in system. So we need enough carbon oxide and enough oxygen, our system, but not too much. The way that accomplished is that, of course, we breathe in air or lungs inflate.

And if you recalled those evil only of the longs little sacks, oxygen can actually move from the air into those little sacks, and then from those little sacks into the vasculature. The best culture are the capillaries, the veins and the ordering of the body. Because the walls of those little EV are exceedingly in, and they have tons of little capital ies that go into them and are all around them.

So this is amazing. right? Is oxygen, eric, passing from inside of these little sex in our lungs because we held the oxyde from the air into the bloodstream, and then that oxygen gets bound up by proteins in the blood, in particular hemoglobin.

And hemoglobin then delivers oxygen to the very cells and tissues of the body. However, oxygen can't just hop on hemoglobin and cruise along with hemoglobin until he gets to say, your brain and then hop off. IT doesn't work that way.

You require carbon dioxide in order to liberate oxygen from him. A global carbon oxide has this incredible property of actually being able to change the shape of hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is shaped as a sort of a cage around oxygen molecules, and when it's in that cage shape, the oxygen can be liberated.

So you've got oxygen and humid loan bound to one another moving through your bloodstream. But if a tissue needs oxygen, there needs to be carbon oxide present to open up that cage. And that's what carbon oxy does.

IT allows that cage a chain shape, and then the oxygen can be liberated and then can be delivered to the tissues, whether not that brain tissue, a muscle tissue, so on and so forth. And so those are the major chemical components of breathing. There are a few other aspects related to the chemical components of breathing, such as the fact that carbon dioxide is strongly related to how accepted or how basic your body is in general.

So for instance, if carbon oxide levels go weigh down your blood, PH goes way up. That is, you become more alcoa. Now for many people, the word PH and the whole concept of PH immediately starts to avoid anxiety and of itself.

Um PH is actually very simple. You want the body basically to be at A P H of about seven point four. There are some regions of your body, in particular along the gut, which that number is importantly different in order for a digestion to work properly.

You've all heard of the gut microbiome, the little microbes that provided you have enough of them, and they're diverse enough, allow your brain body to functions optimates at the level, immune system, hormonal e system, brain a well in the gut you want the PH sometimes be slightly more, because when it's more acidic, the little microbiota flourish far more than if you were more basic. But basic, you want the rest of the body to be at about P H seven point four. If carmody oxide levels go to low, the p increases in a way that you might say all that's a bad, but that actually allows more oxygen to be available to the tissues of your body, at least temporarily.

Will talk about this a bit more later if i'm losing any view just hanging in there because we're almost done with this whole business of the mechanics in the chemistry of breathing. And then we can get into the tools and we visit some of this later to clean up any misunderstandings that may have a reason. But as we're talking about carbon oxide over and over again and how key IT is to have common to oxide, and the problems with IT going to higher too low, you should probably be asking yourself, what actually makes carbon oxide go too low, right?

We know that we breathe in oxygen, and then I can pass from the lungs and the evy only into the bloodstream. And then we need carbon and oxygen, deliberate oxygen from the hemoglobin, into the cells, tissues of the body. And we know that when we x hail, or actually, I ve been told you this yet, but you should know that when you x sail, carbon oxide is actually taken from the blood stream back into the was AV only of the lungs.

And then when you x sail, it's expelled through your mouth or through your nose out into the world. So the way I just described all that in hale, bringing oxygen, x hail, expert carbon dioxide pretty straight forward, right? Indeed, IT is.

And IT also tells you that were you to excel a lot more or a lot more vigorously, you would excel more carbon oxide. And in fact, that's exactly the way that works. When you hyperventilate, of course, you are inhaling more than usual, but you are also exhilarating than usual. So you are, of course, bringing in more oxygen in to your body, but you're also removing more carbon dioxide from your body than Normal commedia oxx IDE because of the ways that IT regulates brains state.

In fact, the way in which IT regulates the excitability, literally, the ability of your neurons to engage electrically or not IT can create states of panic and anxiety, which is why when you hyperventilate, you feel an increase in anxiety, or when you feel an increase in anxiety, you hye prevents ally. It's a reciprocal relations. In fact, I don't want anyone who has anxiety or who has panic attacks to try this now.

But for most people, it's probably safe as long as you're not driving, you're doing something mechanical. We're Operating machinery that is probably safe to do twenty five or thirty deep in hills and x sales. And you'll notice that by about breath ten, you'll start to feel single and you'll probably feel a little bit more alert.

And again, if you have xiety your panic attack tendencies, please don't do this. But you will feel an increase in so called automation ic alzo in increasing the activity overall sympathetic nerve system, which has nothing to do as sympathy as everything to do with alert tss. You'll actually deploy a general from your address inal.

So I just do this now. You can try this now again, provided you in a safe place and you don't have aniele or panic attack and and sees you just breathing through your nose and out through your mouth. Remember, we're breathing in more and more vigorously, and we're excelling more and more vigorously than we Normally would to go something like this.

Now by breath eight or nine or ten, you'll notice that your body starts to heat up. That's due to a couple of things, mainly the release of a journey from your dreams. I am already feeling little bit light headed.

The light headiness is actually because your vast culture, the capitals in veins and to some extend, even the arteries of your body and particular in your brain, are actually starting to constrict. Or you're cutting off blood flow to the brain. why? Well, because carbon dioxide actually a visio dialect, or Normally exist in your body to keep capital's veins and arteries dilate, ted, to allow blood to pass to them.

When you hyperventilation, you're bringing in a lot of oxygen, which you think would make you more alert. And indeed, IT does. But you are also expelling a lot more carbon oxide than you Normally wood, and that's causing some vaio construction.

And you're going to start feeling tingly in the prophet and your fingers and toes perhaps, or your legs, you will also know, is that you're feeling more alert in the brain, but that you might start to feel a bit of anxiety. So hyperventilation, yes, brings in more oxyde also removes more carbon dioxide. The removal of excess carbon, or oxx IDE, puts you into a state that's called hypoxic c right?

Hypoxic a hypoxia is reduced levels of oxygen relative to Normal. Hyper capa is reduced levels of carbon dioxide relative to Normal, and is those reduced levels of common oxide that are largely responsible for that elevation and energy. And at the same time, a feeling of a bit of anxiety, the construction of the microvascular or in the brain and body, and therefore the feelings of being kind of tingle and having kind of an urgency to move.

okay. So by now, IT should be clear that we need both oxygen and carbon dioxide. And across the course of this episode, I will explain how to adjust those ratios of oxygen, carbon dioxide, depending on what your immediate needs are and what you plan to do next with them, not that sleep or exercise or mental work eeta before going any further.

However, there is something I want to touch on, because even though not everyone will experience this, I think enough people experience IT that IT is of interest and knows the right time to touch into what happens when you go up to a very high altitude, meaning why it's hard to breathe when you get up to high altitudes. So if you're close to sea level, you are getting out of the opto bone baLance of oxygen in the air you breathe as you assend in altitude. So let you go to six thousand, five or ten thousand may be, and eleven thousand feet above sea level.

Or maybe you, one of those rare individuals that climbs, deny. Or you mount everest and you get up there, and, you know, is that you most people are going to wear an oxygen mask. Why is IT that you need an oxyde mask at those very high altitudes? Or when people do these very high altitude skydives that they need oxygen? Way a pie.

Well, a lot of people say, oh, there's not much oxygen there. You know, the area is thinner. okay. Well, perhaps a Better way to think about IT is that remember when we were talking about the mechanical aspects of breathing and the fact that the lungs don't really move themselves, that they have the muscles to diagram and entry cost of muscles to move them.

Well, a lot of the reason why your lungs can feel so readily with there is that when you don't have much air in your lungs, there's very low air pressure in your lungs relative to outside you. okay. So what we mean that is if you were to open up your mouth or your nose and breathe, that is, breathe in through your nose or mouth, what's going to happen is air is going to move from high pressure to low pressure.

So it's very easy to fill your lungs, even though you need those muscles to move. The various things around that allow your lungs to fill. The error is going to go from high pressure to low pressure.

So for those who you listen, I just took big in, held through my nose. And then when you x sail, right, you're basically taking the lungs from a state in which the pressure is really high. And the lungs, you know, high pressure, like a balloon that fall.

And the pressure in your lungs, when your lungs are full, is higher than the air outside. So it's pretty easy to excel that air through the nose or mouth. When you're at high altitudes, the air pressure is lower.

And so what happens is when the air pressure is lower outside your body and your lungs are not full of error, you don't have that really steep gradient of high pressure outside the body to low pressure inside your lungs. And so you actually have to put a lot more effort into breathing air into your lungs. You have to really exert a lot of force.

You have to get the diagram in those intercostal muscles working really hard. You might even find that your shoulders are lifting with each breath because you really have to generate a lot of force to get enough air and oxygen into your lungs. Now important principal to understand is that in humans and in some other species, but really what we're talking about now is humans, when you inhaled an active process, you really need to use those muscles of the inter costal in the diagram in order to inflate the logs.

But the whole process is made easier when air pressure outside your body is higher than IT is in your lungs, because then they're onna fill up really readily. X hAiling, at least for humans, is a passive thing. You just have to relax the diagram and relax the inter costal and let the rib cage and fall back to its original position.

So inhaling is active and exhaling is passive. And so what happens is we've you're at a high altitude and the air pressures very low, then you have to put a lot of energy into breathing air into your lungs to get an equivalent amount of oxygen into your lungs and then into the bloodstream. So that's why when you arrive at a high altitude location for the first few days, you going to feel light headed, may be a headache.

You're also going to have more build up of carbon oxide in your system. And so the whole baLance of oxygen and carbon oxide is going to be disrupted. I mention all that because, yes, indeed, there are some changes in the atmosphere ic gases at high altitudes, and that can impact how much oxygen you can bring into your system, into your tissues.

But now I heard many explanations of why it's hard to breathe, why you feel loud at altitude. Well, you just discovered one reason, which is that you don't have that steep high pressure to low pressure gradient from the outside of the body into inside of the body. The converse is also true if you've been at altitude for a few days and you've had the opportunity to adjust, a lot of athletes, for instance, will go train at altitude.

It's hard for them in the first days or weeks and then they get really good at training at altitude. There are a number of different adaptations that occur in terms of the amount of oxygen that could be Carried in the blood by hema global, and the interactions between carbon oxide in human global and oxygen that allow more oxygen to be delivered to the tissues such that altitude, you can function just Normally. But if you then move very quickly from altitude, so you've been training at eight thousand feet or ten thousand feet, you've been hiking up at the high level.

You've adapted and you've down to sea level well, for about two to five days, you're onna feel like an absolute beast. You're going to be able to essentially deliver far more oxygen, your muscles per breath. In part that is because of the way that the hemoglobin and the oxyde that is Carrying has bitten altered when you were at high altitude.

But it's also because when you are you at the high altitude, those inter costal muscles and the tire friends got trained up quite a bit and allowed you to generate more air volume for every breath. In other words, those muscles got stronger and you ve got more efficient at driving the french nerve consciously to really breathing a lot of oxygen. So you don't feel light headed headache at seta.

O, that's a little bit of an aside, but it's an important aside, I believe, because a answers a question a lot of people ask and that a lot you will wonder about. And b, because IT incorporates both the mechanical aspects of breathing and the chemical aspects of breathing, I realized it's a little bit of a unusual circumstance. But now, if anyone asked why it's hard to breathe altitude, you know, I has to do with this lack of a high pressure to low pressure gradient across the body and with the atmosphere outside you.

It's also an opportunity for me to say that if you do find yourself at altitude of a headache, you're feeling like you just can't catch your breath, spending some time really consciously trying to draw in larger breath of air as much as that might seem, fatigue and you will be short of breath IT will allow you to adapt more quickly and a little bit later in the episode will touch on a few methods, including deliberate hyperventilation, combine with some breaths that can allow you to deliver more oxygen to the cells immediately. Upon arriving at altitudes, you don't get quite as much headache, disorientation and on. So leaving breathing at altitude decide, let's all come back down to the same conceptual level.

We can ask ourselves, for instance, what is healthy breathing and what is unhealthy breathing. And the first place we want to tackle this is within the context of sleep. So when we go to sleep at night, we continue to breathe.

That's no surprise. If we didn't, we would die during sleep. However, there is a large fraction of the population that only breathe during sleep.

They're not taking deep enough or frequent enough breath s and therefore, they are experiencing what's called sleep pony. They are becoming high poxy hypo oxygen. There's less oxygen being brought into their system than is necessary. People that are Carrying excess weight, either fat way or muscle way, or both, are more prone to nighttime sleep opening.

However, there are a lot of people who are not overweight who also 他 sleep happy。 How do you know if your experiencing sleep happy? Well, first of all, excessive daytime sleeping ess and excessive daytime anxiety combined with daytime sleepiness is one sign that you might be suffering from sleep up here.

Your thing is, if you happen to snore, it's very likely that you are experiencing sleep apion. And I should mention that sleep happy is a very serious health concern. IT greatly increases the probability of a cardiological event, heart attack, stroke IT is a precursor or sometimes the direct cause of sexual diffunce in males and females.

Cognitive disfunction during the daytime IT can exacerbate the effects of dementia, whether not age related dementia of the Normal sort or alzire type dementia, which is an acceleration of agri cognitive decline. If you're somebody is how a traumatic brain injury, if you're experiencing a lot of stress, sleep after any, is going to greatly disrupt the amount of oxygen brought in to your brain and body during sleep and is going to lead to a number of nighttime and daytime issues. So it's something that really needs to be addressed and will get into this a bit more later.

But since I raised IT as a problem, I do want to raise the solution. One of the major treatments for sleep up is that people get a sep p device, which is a face mask in a machine that theyll sleep with. And while those can be very effective, not everyone needs a sea APP.

One of the more common methods nowadays being used to treat sleep up there, which is purely behavioral and intervention and is essentially zero costs, is that people are starting to shift deliberately to nasal of breathing during sleep because of the additional resistance of nasal breathing, and because of the fact that there is far less tendency, if any, if any, excuse me, to snore when nasal breathing, taping the mouth shut using medical tape prior to sleep. Excuse me, putting medical tape on the mouth prior to going to sleep, and then sleeping all night with medical tape on the mouth is one way that people can learn to nazar breeze during sleep and can greatly offset a lot of sleep open, snoring and sleep related issues. Number of people don't want to or don't feel safe putting medical tape on their mouth prior to sleep.

For some reason, they think they are gonna suffer. But of course, you would wake up if you start run out of air um at any moment. So that's not so much a concern. But what they'll do is they will start to use pure need al breathing during any type of exercises or or even just for some period of time, walking during the day or while working. And again later, we'll get into the enormous benefits of shifting to pure nasal breathing when not exercising hard, meaning at a rate that you could Normally hold a conversation, although if you your meeting of reading, you won't be holding that conversation or when simply doing work or um any number of things that serve of low intensity.

You can train your system to become a Better zal breather during the daytime through these deliberate actions of taping the mouth shut or just being conscious of keeping your mouth shut and that in addition, having a number of positive health and aesthetic effect in the daytime is known to also transfer to nighttime breathing patterns and allow people to become nail breathers as opposed to mouth breathers during sleep, and to score less and to have less sleep happy again. If you have severe sleep opener, you probably do need to check out A P A sea pap. You should talk your physician.

But for people who have minor sleep opium or sleep apnea, that's starting to take hold. And these other methods of shifting to becoming a nasal breathing are going to be far more beneficial and far more cost effective than going all the way to the sea pop, which, by the way, doesn't really teach you how to breathe properly as much as IT does adjust the air flow going into your system. That's an important point that when you shift from melt and naseer breathing during sleep, you're actually learning and training your system to breathe properly.

And when I say learning and training your system to breathe properly, what do I mean? Let's put some scientific and mechanistic meat on that. We already talked about the french nerve, this nerve that inter ates the die frame, and that allows for the longs to fill up because of the move in the diagram.

What we didn't talk about, however, with the brain centers that actually control the phonic nerve and control breathing, knowing about these two brain areas and what they do is extremely important, not just for understanding the content of this episode, but for understanding all of the tools that will discuss. And indeed, your general health is that relates to respiration. So there are basically two areas of the brain that control breathing.

The first is called the three butt singer complex. You don't want to worry about the name so much, just know that I was named after a bottle of wine and that IT was discovered by the great jack feldman, who's a professor of neuroscience at the university, california. Los Angeles is one of the most fundamental discoveries in all of news science in the last hundred years or more, because this brain area that jack in his colleagues discovered controls all aspects of breathing that are rithmetic.

That is, when in hils, follow x sales. Follow in hes, follow x sales. That's all control by a small set of neurons in this brain stem areas and round the region of the neck called the prebudget complex.

And we really owe a dead of gratitude to jack and his colleagues from discovering that area, because it's involved in everything from breathing when we're asleep to breathing when we're not thinking about our breathing. IT may have a role, that is, when its function is disrupted. IT may cause things like sudden in fanatic's syndrome.

Believe IT or not, I can explain in large part many of the deaths related to the opposite crisis, because exogenous, like venturo and other sorts of drugs, which are opioid, obviously bind to opiate receptors on that structure and shut IT down. Now, keep in mind, these neurons are designed to be incredibly robust and are designed to fire in L, X, L, in hl, X, L, no matter if we're awake or unaware or sleep to keep us alive. X ogen is opioid like fenno, and drugs that are similar to that can shut down that structure because it's rich with these opp o ID receptors who are buying to that.

And IT shuts off the prebois er complex, which is the major cause of death of people who die from oppoa overdoses. Think a lot don't realize that they think, oh, the ops will shut off the brain or shut down the heart. No IT shuts down breathing. So jack discovery and no doubt will lead to some important things as IT relates to addiction.

And hopefully I think we e Frankly can expect that it's also going to eventually lead to ways to prevent death in people using O P O S or other types of drugs, maybe by blocking opiate receptors in prebois er complex, using things like now truck at at row, in any event, prevent singer complex is controlling in hill excel, in hail excel patterns of breathing, the other brain center controlling breathing again through the frantic nerve, right IT all convergence and goes out through the frantic nerve. These inter costal muscles is that so called paraphrasing al nucleus and the paraphrase nucleus is involved in patterns of breathing where there is not an inhale. Follow by x sale in hail.

Follow by x hae. That is, it's not rythmic one than the other. But rather, whether is a doubling up of inhales or a doubling up of x sales or a deliberate pause in breathing.

So inhale, pause, hail, pause in hail, pause, XL pause. This sort of thing a little bit later will talk about a pattern of breathing called box breathing, which has a very specific and useful applications, in particular for adJusting anxiety. And in that case, IT involves going from rythmic breathing of in hill, in hill, in hill XL.

That is, relying on the rebutting or complex neurons to reliance on the perfect al nucleus neurons and box breathing, just to give away what's probably already obvious as you in hl hold x hal, hold and repeat and that pattern of breathing, even though it's rithmetic in nature because inhales proceed, x sales proceed in hes and so on, there's a deliberate breath hold inserted there. So at any time we're taking conscious control of our breathing, the pariahs al nucleus is getting involved. Now you don't have to assume that the para facial nucleus is the only way in which we take conscious control our breathing.

We can also take control of the public singer complex. You can do that right now. So ferens, you are breathing in some specific pattern now that unless you're speaking or eating, no doubt is going to involve in hails followed by x sales.

But you could, for instance, decide that, yes, inhales are active and exhales are passive, but now you're going to make the exhales active as well. So rather than just in hill and then let your loans to fate, you could in hell and then force the arrow, that's going to represent a conscious taking over of control of the prepuce singer complex. So the reason giving this mechanistic detail is, a is super important if you won't understand all the tools late to breathing.

B, it's actually a pretty simple system, even though the areas have fancy names like preparing a para h acie. It's pretty straight forward, right? You have one area, the controlling a rythmic breathing in health followers excells, and the other area which gets involved in breathing any time you start doubling up on inhales or ex cells.

In fact, the paraphrase al nucleus, the one that you're relying on while you speak, in order to make sure that you still get enough oxygen. It's also the one that you will use if you incorporate the physiological side or a box breathing. And Frankly, most of the time you're using both of these circuits or these brain systems perf actual and prevent your in parallel.

Again, biology loves parallel systems, especially for things that are so critical that if we didn't do them, we would die like breathing. And so that makes sense that we have two different brain structures that control this. So now you have an understanding, the mechanical control of breathing, that is, the different parts within the parts list that involved in breathing, everything from nose to how to evil, the lungs and set, and the muscles involved in moving the lungs.

You understand, i'd like to think a bit about bringing your oxygen and removing carbon dioxide, but not so much carbon dioxide that you can actually use the oxygen. You and you know about two brain centers, one controlling rythmic breathing and one that controlled non rythmic breathing. I want to repeat something that I said a little bit earlier as well, which is that breathing is incredible, because IT represents the interface between conscious and subconscious control over your not just body, not just your lungs, but that how you breathe influences your brain state.

So by using your brain consciously to control your breathing, you are using your brain to control your brain. The best way i've ever heard this described was from a beautiful, I should say, now classic paper in the journal physiology publish in one thousand and eighty eight from balestra, where the final line of the summary intro states the brain, by regulating breathing, controls its own excitability. And just to remind those of you that don't remember what excitement is, exciting city is the threshold at which a given neuron nerve cell can be active or not.

So when we break the certain way, the neurons of our brain are more likely to get engaged. They're more likely to be active. And when we breathe in other ways, our brain becomes harder to activate.

Its excitability is reduced. Now you might think excitability is a great thing. You always want your brain to be excitable, but that's actually not the case. And in fact, that very statement, the balestre an on sugen, made LED to a number of other investigations that were really important in defining how if people over break, that is, if they hyperventilate at rest, they excell, that is, the exham too much carbon dioxide.

What that classic paper by ballestra jin LED to was a number of different investigations in humans, looking at how different patterns of breathing impact the overall state of the brain and the ability of the brain to respond to certain what are called sensory. Keep in mind that your brain is always active. The neurons are firing at low level, low level, low level.

But when you see something or hear something, or you want to focus on something, or you want to exercise or really listen to something, or learn, certain circuits in your brain need to be more active than everything else. That is, there needs to be really high. What's called signal to noise.

There's always a lot of noise and chatter in the background, just like the chapter at a cocktail party or a stadium event. In order to really pay attention, focus, learn all the incredible things that the brain can do, you need that signal to get above the noise. There's a beautiful paper that asks, how does the pattern of breathing, in particular, how does over breathing change the patterns of activity in the brain? This is a paper entitled effects of voluntary hyper venom on cortical sensory responses.

And I will provide a link to the study in the shown note captions. It's a somewhat complicated paper if you look at all the detailed analyses. However, the take away from this paper is exquisite ly simple.

And i'd also believe incredibly important. Basically what IT showed is that when people hyperventilate, they excell. That is, the x hail more carbon dioxide than they would Normally, so they become what's called hypoxic.

C okay, carbon oxide levels are low in the blood, and over a short period of time, they become low in the tissues of the body. When that carbon dioxide level drops low, you would say, okay, well, you're still bringing in a lot of oxygen because there these people are hyperventilating, so they should feel really alert. And indeed, that's what happened.

The people feel very alert, however, because they're not bringing enough carbon oxide in. Or rather, the proper way to say would be because they're over breathing exhaling too much, they are not retaining or keeping in enough carbon oxide. Well then that lack of carbon dioxide means that the oxygen that they are breathing in can't be liberated from the hemoglobin, can't get to the brain.

And what they observe is about a thirty to forty percent reduction in the amount of oxygen that's being delivered to the brain. And the reduction in carbon dioxide also prevent some of the Normal patterns of via dilation, the dilating, the opening up of the capital ies. So again, less blood flow.

But most importantly, as is shown in this paper, the brain overall becomes hyper excitable, IT says, if it's being start of oxygen and blood flow, and all the neurons, in a very nonspecific way, start increasing their firing level. So the background activities game louder and louder. Like the rumble, the is of a crowded a stadium.

And as a consequence, the sensory input from a sound, or from a touch or from some other event in the world doesn't get above the noise. What this means is that when we hyperventilation, we aren't retaining enough carbon dioxide. We are not getting enough oxygen to the tissues that need oxygen.

And as a consequence of that, the brain becomes hyper excitable. We actually know that there's an increase in anxiety and we become less good, less efficient at detecting things in our environment. So we're not processing information as well at all.

The noise goes up and the signal goes down. Again, incredibly important set of findings. I should also mention that hyperventilation is one way that in the laboratory anyway, or in newer surgery units for some time, physicians would evoke seizure and seizures prone patients.

The reason that works is exactly the explanation I just gave you. Seizures is a hyper excitability the brain not enough inhibition or suppression of the overall strategies. So you get these waves.

Are these storms of electrical activity? Low levels of carbon oxide in the brain, because of low levels of carbon oxide in the blood, are one of the major triggers for seasons res. Now I realize that most people listening to this are not epileptic, but none the less.

This brings us all back to this question of what is Normal healthy breathing. I mention before, Normal healthy breathing is breathing about six leaders of air per minute. But of course, most of us don't think in terms of leaders of everyone I onna go measure our lung capacity.

At least most of us aren't to do that. Basically, if you are taking relatively shallow breath s and you're just i'm sitting there working or maybe even walking slowly and not talking or engaging in any kind of speech or eating, chances are six leaders of air per minute is about twelve shallow ish breaths. And when I say shallow, I don't mean breathing like a little bunning rabbit or something like that.

I just mean, you know, casually breathing in, out, in, out. The studies that have explored the breathing patterns in a large populations of individuals who are not suffering necessarily for anyone specific element have shown that most people breathe far too much per minute that they're engaging in anywhere from fifteen to twenty or even thirty shallow breasts per minute. So they are vastly over breathing relative to how they should be breathing.

Now, of course, if you breathe more deeply, so you take a vigorous and hell. And then you excell that air. Well then for to get six leaders of erin your system per minute, you are probably only going to need somewhere between four and six press in order to get that six years per minute.

Now the total time that IT takes to do that inhaling x sale isn't that much longer than a kind of shallow breath, providing you're not deliberately breathing quickly during those shallow breaths. So then you say, well, how is IT that Normal healthy breathing that delivers the appropriate amount of carbon oxide into the system and doesn't excell, doesn't excel too much carbon oxide? How are we supposed do that Normal breathing, right? Are you supposed to breathe four times, then hold your breath until the minute passes? No, what you find is that the correct pattern of breathing is going to involve two things.

First of all, natural breathing, because of the resistance IT provides through the nose that we talk about earlier, is going to deliver more oxygen. You're going to be able to generate more air pressure to fill your lungs. That greater air pressure is going to take longer to x sale. So already were increasing amount of time that each breath is going to take. And also what you find is that people that are breathing in the proper, healthy manner, that is, that are balancing oxygen in common oxyde in the proper ways, are also taking pauses between breath.

S this is extremely important, because even though we have a brain center, the proper singer complex that can control, or I should say, does control, inhale excel rhythmic breathing, those pauses between breast are not always present, in fact, often are not present from people's baseline breathing patterns, and says a consequence, they always breed. And as I told you before, when people over breathe, the brain becomes hyper excitable at the level of the background noise. And yet they are less efficient at detecting and learning information and will get into the specific studies that really illustrate the learning, as by a bit later, they are less sufficient at detecting and learning information, at focusing and so on, as a consequence of this over breathing in the hyper excitability that causes.

Now, of course, that's also just emphasizing the effects of over breathing, a lack of carbon oxide on the brain. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of studies showing that when we don't have enough carbon dioxide in the tissues of our body, that also, problematic for all the tissues, deliver songs themselves. The stomach eta, that relate largely to shift in PH because of the fact that common oxide strongly regulates the acidity, callable of the blood and the tissues that that blood supplies nutrients to, including carbon oxide.

So the basic take away here is you want to breed in a healthy manner at rest. And the best way to do that is to spend some time, and IT doesn't take much, maybe a minute or so each day, paying attention to how quickly you are breathing per minute when you are simply at rest, when you're making coffee in the morning, when you're sitting down to read, when you're on social media, chronically holding your breath is in good, but neither is over breathing. And again, every study that is examined, the typical patterns of breathing and patterns of breathing that show up as Normal and abNormal, has found that more often than not, during the nighttime, people are still breathing, and in the daytime they're over breathing, their hyperventilating.

So next like to address what you can do about your Normal patterns of breathing. That is, how you or anyone can adjust their Normal patterns of breathing from an unhealthy to unhealthy state. But the first thing we have to do, of course, is determined whether not you're already breathing in an unhealthy or in a healthy way.

And again, when I say healthy, you're unhealthy. I mean, are you over breathing? Are you underbreath thing? Are you delivering the appropriate ratios of oxygen, carbon dioxide to the tissues of your brain and body? In order to do this? We're going to do a simple test again.

Please don't do this while driving or Operating heavy machinery or near water of any kind. But assuming that you're not doing any of those things, ensure ge you to sit down certain not lie down, but you sit down. I suppose you also could do IT standing.

And we are going to do what's called the carbon dioxide tolerance test. The carbon dioxide tolerance test is sort of back of the envelope measure of how well you are managing carbon dioxide. That is, how well you can control your breathing, both the mechanical and the chemical level, of a very simple test.

What you're going to do is for the next ten seconds or so. Well, i'm speaking, you're just going to breathe Normally now again and again throughout this episode, i'm going to encourage you to be a naseer. Breathe whenever possible.

But of course, there are instances in which you want to engage mouths breathing. But for the time being, as I continue to blab on for the next few seconds, just inhale through your nose. Exhale through your nose.

You don't have to deliberately slow your breathing or increase the cadences of your breathing. However, in this time, you're also going to want to find some sort of time measuring device like could be your phone or could be a stop watch. What i'm going to ask you to do in a few minutes is i'm gonna you to inhale your nose as deeply as as you possibly can.

That is, you're gna fill your lungs as much as you can through your nose and then start a timer and measure how long IT takes for you to deliberately control that x sale until your lungs are empty. okay. So this is going to be a controlled x sale through the nose after a big, deep breath.

But for the time being, keep breathing at a calm, regular cadence. Hope so. You can find that time measuring device. Now you can come back to IT later, if you like.

When I say in hill, you're going to in hill as deeply as you can through your nose, remembering that the diagram can really help you here to get a deep in hill by having your belly move out while you in hell. And then when I say start, you're gona measure the time that IT takes to do a complete lungs empty excel. In fact, i'll measure IT for you.

Ah this will be one of the rare instances in this podcast where there is going to be a long period of silence as I measure something. So i've got to a stop watch here. So please prepare to do the big in hill and start inhaling now.

So in hill, as deeply as you can, throw your nose, fill your lungs as much as you can. Okay, now start meaning slowly control the x sale through. You know you're trying to let that air out as slowly as possible.

I'm just onna call out every ten or fifteen seconds or so and you want to note when your lungs are empty. I know you can hold your breath with your lungs empty. That is not an accurate measure.

Fifteen seconds IT is important that you know when your lungs are empty and that you're trying to control the XL as much as possible so that you don't arrive at that long empty time too quickly. I'll explain what too quickly means. Thirty seconds.

okay. For those of you that have already reached ung empty, please go back to breathing Normally. For those of you that haven't, can hang in here a little longer if you're still discarding that air forty five seconds and we're rounding towards minute.

Not quite there. Some of you are probably still letting out that air. I want to point out, none of this has to do with cardiovascular fitness level, at least not any kind of direct way.

And sixty seconds. And I realized there will be a small subset of you out there that are still expelling your air in a slow lungs, a slow excel manner through the nose. okay.

So what we just did is back of the envelope, carbon dioxide discard rate OK. If you need to pause this and go back and try and again, you just want a time. How long IT takes you to go from longing to longingly empty again with the full understanding? I know that you can all sit there like beast and hold your breath.

You're long empty. But please don't do that because that's not gonna be informative for what i'm telling you. Now what i'm going to tell you now is that if IT took you twenty seconds or less to excel all your air, that is, you couldn't extend that excel longer than twenty seconds in a kind of back of the ambuLance.

We can say that you have a relatively brief or low carbon oxide tolerance. Okay, if IT took you somewhere between twenty five and forty, maybe forty five seconds, to excel all your air, that is, you could all that excel for about forty five seconds or thirty seconds. And you have a moderate level of carbon oxide tolerance.

And if, for instance, you were able to go fifty seconds or longer for that discard until you hit longer empty, you have a fairly high degree of carbon oxide tolerance. Now here's the deal. If you had low carbon oxide tolerance, that is, your twenty seconds or less, you're going to write down the number three.

okay? If you had moderate levels of carbon oxide tolerance, you're going to write down the number five or you could even put five to six. And then if you are in that bracket of people that was able to discard your air over a period of fifty seconds or more, you're going to write down the number eight to ten. okay.

Now what are these numbers? What are we talking about? And before we get into what to do with these numbers, I want to emphasize, again, this does not have to do with fitness level, percy.

I know some world class try athletes that have very fast carbon oxide blow off times, that is, their discard rates are twenty seconds or less. I should also point out that if you're very stressed, that number is going to be very small. If you're very relaxed, like you just woke up after a long night of sleep and you feel great, that number is going to be extended.

okay? So this is a back of the on bloat measure that you're going to to use each time you decide to do the exercises I want to tell you about in a moment. And the exercises I want to tell you about in a moment can be done every day, if you like.

But what the most interesting studies, at least to me, indicate, is that you could do the exercise i'll tell you about even just once or twice a week, and greatly improve your efficiency of breathing and shift yourself away from over breathing when at rest, even if you're not thinking about how your breathing at rest. okay. So what is this exercise? Well, you just got your number either low, medium or high bracket number for carbon dioxide discard rate member.

If you're in the low category, your number is three. If you're medium, it's five to six. And if you are in the long carbon oxide d discard rate.

Lungern carboro, a discourage that is eight to ten is your number. Now you're going to do two minutes of what most people would call box breathing. What is box breathing? Box breathing are equal duration.

In hell, hold X, L, hold, repeat. So in hell, hold, X, L, hold. Sounds very easy, right? How long do you inhale? And then hold excel, and then hold.

Well, you now know if you are in the low group of carbon dioxide discard rate, your inhales can be three seconds. Your hold will be three seconds. Your X, L will be three seconds, and then you repeat three seconds. So each size of the box, if you will, this can be three seconds long.

If you were in the moderate caring dioxide discard rate category, then you're going to enhance for five to six seconds, whole for five to six, excel for five to six, hall for five to six, repeat for about two minutes. You could do three minutes if you want, but I think it's important to have protocols that are feasible for most people. And that's going to mean doing things for about two to five minutes when IT comes to these breath rehabilitation exercises for restoring Normal breathing.

And then course, if you are in the long category of carbon oxide discard rate, you should be able to do in eight to ten second, in hill, eight to ten second, hold eight to ten second X, L, eight to ten second hold and repeat. Okay, so you could do that exercise now, if you like, or you could do IT at some point offline. You can pause this podcast, if you want, and go try IT.

That's an exercise that you can do for about two to three minutes, once or twice per week. What's happening when you do that exercise? Well, first of all, you are greatly increasing your neural mechanical control over the diagram. M, this is very important.

Most people are not aware of this render nir pathway in the diagram, and you are greatly increasing your mechanical control over this pathway through the process we call neuroplasticity when you deliberately focus on a aspect of your nervous system control, in particular nervous system control over musculars, that Normally is subconscious and you're not paying attention to when you actively take control of that IT requires that your brain adjust and required the relationship between the different components of that circuit. And the wonderful thing is that has been shown to lead to changes in your resting pattern of breathing. Now, why did we go through the homework business of doing the carbon oxide tolerance test well, for people who don't tolerate carbon oxide very well, they don't have very good phonic.

That is no mechanical control of the diagram for whatever reason. Again, doesn't think you're not fit IT just means you don't have or you have not yet developed mechanical control of dire fram IT would be near impossible for you to do box breathing for two or three minutes with eight second and eight seconds hold. Eight seconds excel, eight seconds hold.

So that's why we do a test to see what you're capable of doing. You don't want the box breathing to be too strain where you're where you're really chAllenge to get around the whole box. You wanted to be relatively easy because remember, you're trying to translate this pattern to your Normal pattern of breathing.

That is, your pattern of breathing when you're not consciously thinking about breathing. And what are we really translating when we do this box breathing type exercise? What you're translating is the ability to pause between breast and yet take full mechanically driven breath that involve the french nerve diagram. So again, you're encouraging, especially you use naseer breathing when you do the box breathing, encouraging french control over the diagram and you're getting that six leaders of air per minute or so using fewer and fewer breath over time.

So this is a again, zero cost, although IT does cost a little bit of time, zero cost approach to adJusting your Normal pattern of breathing at rest, which has a huge number of positive outcomes in terms of your ability to stay relatively calm, to not get the hype excitability of the brain IT has actually been shown in various studies and will talk about one in particular later, to greatly improve not just levels of calm and reduce bouts of stress, but also improved nighttime sleep. A huge number of benefits that can come from doing this box breathing exercise, but you gotta get the duration of the sides of the box right? And that's why you do the carbon dioxide tolerance test.

One thing that many people notice after doing the carbon oxide tolerance test even just once, and then doing this box breathing exercise once or twice a week, is that after two or three weeks, the box breathing itself becomes very easy. And in that case, I recommend taking the carbon oxide tolerance test over again. And almost always, what you'll find is that you have been able to extend your carbon dox I discard rate, and therefore, you now fall into a different category, not just the lower medium, but the long common dioxide discard rate category.

And you are able to extend the duration of those in hal holds, XL holds during the box breathing. And of course, the ultimate benefit of all this is that IT translate tes to deeper and yet less frequent breathing when at rest in what not consciously paying attention to how you're breathing during the daytime again, if at all possible, do all of this breathing through the nose. For those of you that have a severely included nose, the recommendation is, is to breathe through your nose more.

But I do realized that for some people it's really uncomfortable to break through the nose because they have such an included nasal pathway and for you folks doing some of this, breathing through the mouth can probably suffice but if at all possible do the breathing through the nose and um please also let me know how your progress h evolves over time with the carbon oxide discard rate in the box breathing and of course the positive shifts that occur in Normal unconscious daytime breathing translate to all the opposite things that we talk about when you are over breathing during the daytime. So what I just described in terms of the carbon dioxide tolerance test and the exercise using box breathing to restore Normal patterns, breathing and not over breathe, and therefore not eliminate too much carbon dioxide, is exactly the two tests that were incorporated into a study that my labor ory did in collaboration with our associate chair of psychiatrists, time for school of medicine, doctor David speel, who has also been a guessed on this podcast previously. And that study explored box breathing, but he also explored other forms of breathing and actually compare those forms of deliberate breathing to meditation as a means to explore what are going to be the minimal effective doses and most effective ways to chronically reduce stress around the clock and improve mood and improve sleep.

So the study i'm referring to was just published recently. It's entitled brief structured respiration practices, enhances mood and reduce physiological alisal. We will also provide a link to newspaper in the showed te captions. What this study really focused on was a simple question, which is what is the shortest st and most effective practice that people can use in order to reduce their levels of stress, not just during that breath work practice or meditation practice, but around the clock, twenty four hours a day, including improvements and sleep.

And we were excited to do this study because many studies that explored how meditation, or in some cases, fewer studies that explored how breath work and impact different brain states or bodily states, but very few studies have explored how those breath work of meditation practices influenced body brain states around the clock when people were not performing the particular meditation or breath work practice. The reason we were able to do this study was really fortunate. The folks over at woop or generous enough to donate a bunch of woop straps, which allowed us to measure Harry variability, a number of other different physiological parameters.

We also got subjective reports about people's mood and feelings of well being. We data about their sleep pinned to us from remote location. And so these people, rather than being brought to the laboratory, being in a very artificial circumstance, the laboratory as much as we like to think our laboratory is realistic um we have virtual reality and things like that. There's nothing as realistic as the real world.

And so we were able to have more than one hundred subjects out in the real world, living their real lives, pinging back to us data all the time, twenty four hours a day, so that we could measure how they are, different interventions that we asked them to do, read word practices or meditation practices were impacting psychological perimeters, and they were also informing us regularly about their subjective mood at ta. We got a lot of data, as you can imagine, and the basic take away from the study was too full. First of all, we discovered that deliberate breath work practices done for about five minutes per day across the course of about a month, LED to greater reductions in stress ended a five minute a day meditation practice.

Now that is not to say that meditation is not useful. In fact, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of papers, including one particular, I should say, particularly beautiful study from when he suzuki s lab at the new york university, showing that a daily ten to thirteen minute mindfulness meditation practice can greatly improve focus, memory and a number of other things related to cognition and learning. However, the research of meditation has shown us that meditation, at least short meditations, mainly lead to improvements in focus in memory, not so much reductions in stress, although they do lead to reductions in stress.

What we found was that any number of different breath work practices, and we explored three done for five minutes today, outperformed meditation in terms of the ability of breath work to reduce stress around the clock. Compared to meditation, the three types of breath work that we explored also showed different effects. I should mention the three types of breath work that we compared with, box breathing of the sort that you just learned about. We compare that to something called cynic sign, which involves two in hills through the nose to get maximum inflated ed lungs, followed by a long x sale.

I'll return to that in a moment that was repeated for five minutes at a time for each session, and a third breath work practice, which was sickly c hyperventilation, which, as the name suggests, involves people inhaling deeply through the nose, then exhaling passively through the mouth, and then repeating in hill through the nose, exhale through the mouth, repeating that for twenty five cycles, one cycle being an in hill and in excel, so that equals one cycle, repeating that for twenty five cycles, then excelling all the air and holding their breath with long empty for about fifteen to thirty seconds, and then repeating in hail excel. Sickly C I. Ventilation for the duration of five minutes or so, people were divided into these different groups of their mindfulness meditation, where they SAT.

They were not told to control their breathing in any specific way. They close their eyes. They focus their attention on region just behind their forehead.

One group to that, the other group did sick like sign. Another group did box breathing. Another group did sick eventually ation as any sort of clinical trial like this or two. We then swap people in the different groups so they served as their own control, so we can evaluate any between and within individual variability.

Get there a lot of data, this paper, but that take away was that for the sake of stress reduction around the clock and for the sake of improving sleep and mood, the most effective practice of the four practices that we examined was the sign c sign again, sign C, I is performed the following way. You inhale through the nose as deeply you can, then you do a second inhale immediately afterwards to try, and maximum inflates the longs. In fact, that's what happens.

We know that during that second inhale, even if it's just a very sharp short in hill, the extra physical vigor that's required to generate that second in hill causes those evil of the lungs, which you may have collapsed. And indeed, in between breads, and often even just through the course of the day. And especially if we get stressed, those AV only if the long starts to collapse.

And because they're damp on the inside there, they have a little bit of fluid. They're like a balloon with a little bit of fluid in the middle IT takes a little bit physical force to put to pop those open and you're not literally exploding them pop, but you're reinflated them with air and then you perform the long x ale through the mouth until lungs are empty. So IT looks exactly like this.

Now we know that one single physiological sigh of the sort that I just described performed at any time of day under any conditions, whether or not you're about to walk on stage to give a talk or you're in a meeting in your feeling stress, or you're in a conversation that's very stressful, or you can feel stressed mounting because you're in traffic or any number of syria gc, or physical stressors that may be approaching you or you feel or oppressing you.

Doing one psychological side of the sort that I just described is the fastest physiologically verified way that we are aware of to reduce your levels of stress and to reintroduce calm, that is, to shift your automation ic nervous system from a state of heightened levels of autonomic als. That is, sympathetic nervous system, as it's called, is at a higher activation level in the so called parasympathetic nervous system, again, in sympathetic nova system, having nothing do as sympathy as everything to do with so called fighter flight, although IT controls other things too, including positive sl and the paris sympathetic ever system often refer to as the rest and digest system, although IT does other things too is associated with calling. Those two things are always in kind of push pull with one another, like a see saw or push pull hover.

You want to think about IT one physiological side, meaning that big, deep in hill, short, second in hill, also through the nose, and the long x hae to completely long empty, is known to restore the level of baLance in the sympathetic per sympathetic neural circuitry and is the fastest way to reintroduce com. That's one physiological site in this study. What we asked was that people perform that repeatedly so called sick sign for the duration of five minutes, and the people who did that cyclic sign for five minutes a day, regardless of the time of day, that they did IT experience the greatest reductions and stress, not just during the practice, but around the twenty four hour cycle.

And IT translated again to all sorts of positive subjective changes, improvements and sleep, lower resting heart rate at all times of day. So this is important. Again, this study was not just expLoring what happens during meditation of breath work, cyclic sign, IT said. IT was expLoring how the changes that occur during that practice translate to changes in breathing and heart rate mood at a throughout the twenty four hour cycle. So the take away here is too full.

First of all, if you are somebody who wants to improve your mood and reduce your overall levels of stress, and you only have five minutes to invest in that hopefull, you're doing all the other things like trying to get proper sleep and exercise, social connection, nutrition, eta, sunlight in the morning, of course, can't leave that out. But if you were going to devote five minutes a day to a stress reduction practice that is now supported by data to translate to reductions and stress around the clock, the data say that you would want to invest that in specific sign that is, double in health through the nose, extended excell through the mouth until your lungs are empty, then repeat for five minutes a day. Of course, if you like to do meditation is still had positive effects, meaning IT reduce stress, although not as much as cyclical sign, you could do box breathing if you want, for the purpose of reducing stress.

All of the practices we explored did reduce stress, but cynic sign, perform for five minutes a day, had the most robust and pervasive effect in reducing stress, improving mood and improving sleep. That's the first message of the study. The second take away is that one physiological sigh, that's right.

Just one physiological sie where you inhale deeply through the nose, another inhaling the nose to maximum and play the oil, the ones, and then you x hail to completely longer, empty, and then go back to a Normal breathing, is the fastest way to introduce the level of calm and to reduce your overall levels of stress in real time. And this is very important. I think that out there these days, we hear a lot about stress reduction techniques, and most all of the stress reduction techniques that have been explored, everything from a sage to meditation, to breath work, to a hot shower to a foot rub, will calm you down.

The question is, do they calm you down? Gesturing that practice? Great if he does. But does IT also translate to reduce levels of stress at other times in the twenty four hour of cycle in other positive effects as well? So one physiological size, a very efficient way to adjust that ratio of sympathetic to paris sympathetic activation and immediately bring about comes excEllent for real time control of stress.

The other thing about philological sizes that it's not a hack, it's not the application of a breathing practice to something that IT wasn't intended for. In fact, psychological size were not discovered by me at all. They were discovered by physiologists in the one thousand nine hundred and thirties, who found that when people underbreath, they have a build up of carbon oxide in their system, and even though common oxide is essential for life, you don't want too much of IT in your system, and that people, whether not they were sleep or awake, would engage a philological site spontaneously.

Subconsciously, they would do this double in hair through the nose and extended x hal through the mouth. And that did not just eliminate excessive carbon oxide from the system IT also rebaLanced the oxygen carbon oxide ratio in the proper ways. In fact, it's observed in animals. You might see this in animals that are tired. When animals are humans get tired, they tend to start and breathing a little bit, and that can often disrupt the baLance of carbon oxide in oxygen.

And right before a dog will go down for, for instance, you'll notice you'll do this double in hill excel people when they are sleeping, if they hold their breath for a period of time, which Frankly all of us do periodical throughout sleep, they will engage spontaneous physiological side during the daytime. We are often holding our breath, especially nowadays. And there's a study on this um that will talk about little bit later where when people text message or their emAiling, although nowadays are are mainly on social media text messaging, they often are holding their breath and they will follow a breath hold buy a physiological size because during that breath LED they're building up the level of commonly oxide in their system.

Now mind you, I spent close to half an hour text you that most people are over breathing at rest and that's also true but people often will shift from over breathing to underbreath thing, which is a terrible pattern. So physiological size done either as a one off one physiological size to clap stress or reduce stress in real time, or repeatedly dly over five minutes as a practice that you do each day, is going to be not just the most effective to approach reducing stress around the clock and in real time, but also the one that's highly compatible with the way that the neural circuits that control breathing were designed. The physiological site has some other very useful applications.

One of the more, I would say, useful ones, at least to those of you, that exercise is going to be the use of physiological side in order to remove the so called sides stitch so if you've ver been running or swimming or exercising you felt a cramp on your right side chances are despite what your high school pee cota that raising your arms above your head or drinking less water before you exercise is not going to get rid of that crap and here's why it's not a crap at all if you recall the servo three, four and and five nerves that give rise to the french nerve and go down and innovate your diet for him. Well, as I mentioned before, a certain number of those nerve bs actually course into the diagram and go up underneath. And if you recall earlier, I also said that the dire um sits right on top of the liver.

In other words, you actually have a sensory innovation of the differ me, the deep dive frame and the liver. And there's something called the references pain, which is what people generally experiences when they have that side stitch on their right hand side. So if you ever exercising and you feel a clamp on your right hand side, it's possible that it's a genuine crap.

But more likely is the fact that that french nerve sensory innovation is now being Carried up to your brain and you are detecting some local or references ced pain in the liver and in the dire frame. Now that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing anything wrong, although you might not be breathing properly for running at that moment. And that's what gave rise to IT could be some spacing of renal nerve or some inefficient breathing during running.

We had entire series on fitness with dr. Ity galpin. One of those episodes included a lot of information on breathing. IT was the episode on endurance. Although breathing was a topic that was thread through multiple episodes in that series. You can find that series, that huberman lab that com, talks a lot about how to breathe during running, how to breathe during weight lifting at a. But the point for now is that if ever you're experiencing that right side, sides stitch, I encourage you to perform the physiological side.

And the good news is you can perform IT while still running or while still swimming, although I suppose was swiming, you might have to make some adjustments because, of course, you don't want to hail water or while cycling any type of activity. If you'd perform that physiological side, generally two or three times, what will occur is that because of changes in the firing, in the renal nerve, and in particularly because of changes in the sensory feedback from the sensory component, the french curve back to the brain, you will experience in the deviation of the pain from that right side. Sid stitch, in other ways, you can get rid of sidecar PS during physiological size, during activities, in particular, during running activities.

Now I should also mention that if you you're experiencing a side stitch on the left side, chances are that has to do with excessive air or flew IT in your stomach. And there are reasons for that. That also have to do with the way that the phonic nerve is its bilateral and branches to both sides, and is catching sensory input on the left side from some of the local organs and sensory innovation of those organs.

Kay, but if you have right side, side stitch, the physiological side done two or three times while still running out to relieve that side stitch. Now, as long as we're talking about breathing and the phonic nerve and the relationship between the french nerve and your liver and your stomach and some of the other organs in that neighborhood, we should talk about the relationship between breathing and heart rate. This is an incredibly important topic, so much so that I perhaps should have brought IT up at the beginning of the episode.

But you know know what your die frame does, right? When you inhale, your die frame moves down. That's right when you can track your diagram that moves down to create space for longs. Hell, and when you excel, your die friend moves up.

Well, when you in hell and your dyer friend moves down, what happens is there's a more space created in the thash cavity, in particular, if you're also breathing deeply and you're using those intercostal muscles to expand your ribs. As a consequence, the heart actually gets a little bit bigger. It's a temporary enlargement in the heart, but it's a real enlargement.

And as a consequence, whatever blood is in the heart is now in a larger volume because the heart got bigger. And as a consequence, that blood is moving more slowly through that larger volume for a short period of time. But nonetheless, moving more slowly, your nervous system detects that and sends a neural signal to the heart to speed the heart rate up.

In other words, inhales increase heart rate. The opposite is true when you exile, when you exil, your die friend moves up, your rib cage tends to move in word a bit, and you compact the heart, you reduce the volume of the heart overall. When you reduce the volume of the heart overall, blood flow through the heart accelerates because it's a smaller volume.

So given you a blood move more quickly through that smaller volume, your nerve system detects that and sends a signal to slow the heart down. So just as in hails speed the heart up, x hails slow your heart rate down. Now, of course, even though you can double up on inhales or even trip up on in hails, sooner later, if you inhale, you're going to have to act sale, right? And the converse is also true, of course.

So what does this mean in terms of controlling your heart rate? Well, let's say you are going in for a blood draw or you're going out on stage in your stress. Well, I would encourage you to do a physiological side, maybe two physical gc size, to bring your level of calm up in your left of stressed down.

Nonetheless, if you have any reason why you want to quickly reduce your heart rate or accelerate your heart rate for sake of physical work output, or to calm yourself down, additionally not just use the physiological side well, then you can take advantage of this relationship between in hills and excels controlling heart rate. If you want to increase your heart rate, you can simply in hill longer and more vigorously relative dix sales. And if you want to decrease your heart rate, well, then you're going to make your excels longer and or more vigorous than your inhales. In fact, this process, which is called the respiratory ory sinus, a rithmetic, is the basis of what we call heart rate variability. Heart rate variability involves the vagus nerve, the tenth cranial nerve, which is a parasympathetic nerve that is associated the coming aspect of the autonomic error system, slowing your heart rate down by extending your ex cells and IT really forms the basis of most all breathing practices.

If you look at any breathing practices, whether not wim hf breathing, too more breathing, colli breathing, pony uma breathing, physiological signs, cystic signing, and on and on and on, if you were to measure the ratio of inhales to x sales and the vigor of inhaled x sales, what you'd is that each one would create a net increase or a net decrease in heart rate that could be very accurate, predicted by whether or not that breathing practice emphasized in hils emphasized x hails, or had those two features in hill and x hail be of equal duration and intensity. In fact, if you want IT to equilibrate your heart rate, what you would do is you would do box, because inhale, hold, excel hold is, by definition, creating equal duration inhales and excels of essentially equivalent vigor. When you do a physiological side, you're doing two big in halls, which you can speed your heart rate up just a little bit, but then a long, extended excel, the axel in the end, is much longer than the two inhales, even when combined.

And so you get a net decrease in heart rate, the calming effect, and then practices such as tumor breathing or with hop breathing or sick lic type of innovation, deep inhales and exhales. But the n hils are more vigorous compared to the more passive x sales are going to lead to increases in heart rate. So the relationship between breathing and heart rate is an absolutely lockstep one, where your heart rate follows your breathing.

Your heart rating your breathing are an intimate discussion with one another, but where always and forever your inhales increase your heart rate, your excels decrease IT. Now this feature, which physicians called respiratory ory and and say, rythmic, or we sometimes here about more often now, days as heartbreak variability, is something that people in sport have known about for a very long time. It's why, for instance, that Markswoman will exham just prior to taking a shot.

That's particularly true for people that compete in the baton where they ross country skies, the heart rate is up, up, up theyll get to the point where they actually have to shoot at the target and theyll x hail, and then they're theyll shoot the target. This is also why, for instance, if you want to bring your heart rate down very quickly between rounds of Marshall arts, there are number of different ways to do that. But an extended x tail of any kind of, Frankly, any breathing practice that emphasizes exiles is gonna ing your heart rate down.

This been incorporate in a number of different context, including sport, military. It's also now being incorporated in the clinical context for people who feel a panic attack coming on. I'm very gratified to learn that the physiological side is now being explored as a tool to prevent panic attacks and anxious attacks.

This is prior to the panic attacks, people bringing their heart rate down again through those extended x sales. So learning to extend your x sale is really a terrific skill to master and is a very easy skill to master. Frankly, why do I say a skill will remember what I said earlier, which is that humans inhalation timely, and most typically will passively exile. Just let the air drop out of them at whatever rate, depending on how much air they inhaled, actively exhaling that is, actively relaxing the diagram m and actively relaxing those intercostal muscles of the chest.

Those ones, or I should say, between the ribs, is a skill that you can very quickly acquire and will allow you to use that relationship between the french nerve, the the size of the heart, the heart volume and all that stuff to really take control of heart rate quickly, so that if you feel like your heart is racing too much, and Frankly, a lot of people have a lot of what's called into acceptive awareness, especially anxious people. They can really sense what's going on in their body. Other people less so.

Only on my heart beating is rated. Jump up out of my chest. And I don't like that. Don't like that. Big long x sale.

Doesn't matter if you do IT through the nose or the man of big long x sales gonna you to slow your heart rate down. Let's talk about hick ups. Everybody experiences hiccups from time to time.

I think most people agree that one hick up sort of funny, two hick ops in a row is really funny. And three hick ops in a row is where IT starts to be concerning, in part because hiccup s can be kind of painful. The experience pain in your gut to your lower abdomen and sometimes in your chest as well, that feels kind of intrusive.

IT gets in the way of having conversation or just sitting there in relaxing. Fortunately, there's a simple way to get rid of hick ups. And you can arrive at that simple technique if you understand a little bit about what gives rise to hick ups.

The reason we get hiccups at all is because we experience a spasm of the french nerve. The french nerve, as you recall, is a nerve that emanates from the cervical region to be specific sea, three, four and five. Those spinal nerves go down course behind the heart and innovate the dire friend, which is the muscle that, when I contracts IT, moves down, allows alonga fill.

And then when you relax the diagram m, then the diagram moves up and the lungs shrinkage. The excell air, so called excEllent. Now the front nerve also has that sensory brand. So it's not just involved in controlling the diagram at the motor level, it's also sensing things deep within the diagram. M and in the liver as well as the liver sits right below the die frame.

So a hick up has that painful sensation from time to time because there is a rapid sensory feedback or a signal rather of a sharp kind of sensation of contraction within the dire frame. And that's a relate back to the brain, and you consciously perceive that as a little bit of pain. And then, of course, the hick hop is the hick cup, which is the best of the french nerve, that experiences more less in your throat.

But all this really is happening along the french nerve and toward the diagram. What this all means is that if you can stop the french nerve from spasming, you can stop pick ups. There are a lot of approaches that people try to take to eliminate spasm the phonic nerve.

You'll hear that breathing into a bag, which is one way to reinject or reinhed carbon oxide that otherwise would be expelled out into the environment can help. That's a very indirect method. IT rarely works, Frankly, because it's really has to do more with adJusting your breathing to try adjust the activity of the french nerve.

It's a really round about way of trying to alleviate hiccups. Some people will experience relief from drinking from a glass of water from the opposite side of the glasses or have to till over at the way. It's of messy approach. Again, IT doesn't tend to work a lot of the time. For some people, that works every time, but for most people, IT doesn't work at all.

However, there is a technique that can reliably eliminate hick ups and is a technique that takes advantage of hyper contracting the french nerve over a short period of time, so that IT then subsequently relaxes or alleviates the spasming of the tonic nerve. And that simple method is to inhale three times in a row. This is a very unusual pattern of breathing, but what IT involves is to go big, deep in hill through your nose, then, before you excel any air, take a second in hill through the nose, however brief that in hill might be.

And then a third, even micro or millisecond long, in hill through your nose, to get that third in hill, and then hold your breath for about fifteen to twenty seconds and then slowly, x sale. So even though i'm not experiencing any hick ups right now, I will demonstrate the method for eliminating hick ups so that you're all clear on how to do IT. Okay, here I go.

okay. So it's three in hils all through the nose. And IT is true that that second and third in hill takes some physical effort to really get additional air into the lungs without exhaling first, IT feels like the only way I can describe IT really is as a sharp second and third in hill, because you really have to engage the musculars of those intro stal muscles in the dire frame in order to do IT.

And then that long excel can be through the nose or the mouth. But I find a particularly relaxing, or even pleasant to do IT through the nose. This method of three inhales through the nose, followed by a long excel through the nose or mouth, will eliminate hick ops right away.

Because what he does is that hyper excites the french nerve three times in a row, a very unnatural pattern for the french nerve to fire. And then IT undergoes a hyper polarization, as we call IT, in which the french are actually stands a much lower probability of getting activated again for some period of time afterwards. So IT is important that you try and return to Normal cadences of breathing.

After doing this, three inhales followed the long XL. If you need to perform at a second time in order to eliminate hiccups because they're simply not going away, that's fine. You can do that. But as far as we know, this is the most efficient and science supported way to eliminate hick ops.

Now, up until now, i've been talking about breathing techniques, and i've mainly focused on breathing techniques that emphasize the excel, whether not the carbon xi tolerance test, whether not it's cyclical sign or the physiological side that use in real time to reduce stress. One thing that we haven't talked about so much is sickly hyperventilation, sickly. Hypo ventilation, as you recall, is about of twenty five or so breath, inhaling deeply through the nose, and then passively excelling, or sometimes actively expiring, typically through the mouth, might look like this.

That's a very active inhale through the nose and excel through the mouth that can also be done active in health through the nose, passive x health through the mouth like so. In any event, that pattern of breathing, repeated for ten to twenty five breathe greatly, increases levels of automation. Ic rows, in fact, is known to deploy a journey from the adjuncts.

And in our study, we had people then excell all their air. So breathe out, hold their breath for a fifteen to thirty seconds and then repeat for a period of five minutes. That did lead to some very interesting and positive psychological changes in terms of stress mitigation, although not as significant as was observed with signal sign, as I talked about earlier.

Now there is a lot of interest in sick type of ventilation for sake of, for instance, extending breath holes. This has become popular in part because so called a wim hf method, which is a method that combines breathing slick ventilation, followed by lungs full or lungs empty breath, depending on which variant of the wolf method one is using separately, and I really want ever size separately. The wolf method also involved deliberate cold exposure, which is all of, you know, i'm a big fan of, and we have done episodes podcast on, and we have two kids on deliberate cold exposure from increasing dopamine levels up and never levels mean system function, IT said.

We hf method d also incorporates that. And IT has a mindfulness component. If you want to caution people that any time you're doing cyclic ba eveline, you want to be very cautious about not doing IT in or near water, because IT does greatly increase the risk of shell or water blank out.

And that's because when you do cynic up of ventilation, you are expelling, you're explaining more carbon oxide than usual. And what I haven't told you yet is that the trigger to breathe is actually an increase in carbon dioxide. What I mean by that is you have a small set of neurons in your brain stem that can detect when carbon oxide levels in your bloodstream reach a certain level.

And when they reach that level, they trigger the gas reflects and or the hunger for breathing. In other words, we don't breathe because we crave oxygen, although we do need oxygen, of course, nor just survive, and for our brain to function, and by the organs to function. But our brain is wired such that IT has a threat sensor, which is carbon dioxide levels are getting too high, and that's what triggers the motor reflects to breathe, and in some cases, gasp for air, depending on how starved for air we are.

So if you do sickly kype of innovation with not wim off method or whether or not it's too more method, again, again, these things are similar. They're not exactly the same. There are other breathing methods that incorporate sicklier cover of innovation.

What you're doing is you're getting a rid of a lot of carbon dioxide and therefore, you're removing the impulse or lowering the impulse debris so that when you enter that breath hold phase after the hyper preventing lation, it's a much longer period of time before you feel the anxiety and the hunger and the impulse to breathe. That's one of the real benefits of any technique that incorporate sick prevention is that rather than reduce your stress level in real time, IT actually does the opposite. IT increases your stress level, increases your levels of autonomic rosal, but you're doing IT deliberately.

And then during those breaths, what's happening as you have a lot of a generalin circulating in your system because of the way that hyper vendors triggering the release of a journey from your dream, al gLance, IT also triggers the release of epa ran, which is the same as a general in from an library called luxurious, which makes you feel more alert. And then during those breath holds, and in the subsequent rounds of cyclical hype of innovation, people experience what IT is to have a lot of a general in their system. But they are controlling the release of that, a general which is far and away different than when life events are cheering that are journal.

So what IT really is as a form of self induced stress inoculation, and I do think there are benefits to practicing signal I prevention, because IT does allow you to learn how to self deploy a general and epp n afra from local rules and from the address inal. right. Got that backwards.

A journey from your agronian eban, eef n, from locus, us and IT allows you to explore what IT is to maintain calm state of mind and body when you have a lot of a journey in your system, which certain studies are starting to show can allow people to be able to lean into the stressful aspects of life. And lets be honest, life is stressful in any event. Now we're all going to experience stress at some pointer.

And when we do, we want to make sure that we're not overtaken by the release of adrenaline from the that sudden surge of epanchin from locust alias. So doing simply, that type venues that we won or two times per week, again, twenty five active inhale, passive or active x sale, do expect to feel tingly because of that reduction in carbon oxide from x sAiling so much. Do expect to feel little bit agitated.

Be very careful doing this if you're somebody who has anxian attacks or somebody who has panic attacks or disorders of any kind. But if you don't know, you want to explore this, you'll notice you start to feel really ramped up, and then during the breath holds, which again can be done 把 x hAiling and stopping for some period of time。 Fifteen, maybe in sixty seconds, is a time in which you can explore how to remain mentally calm.

Some people have been choose to do math problems or think of things in a kind of structured way, while they have a lot of these hormonal neurotransmitter circulating high levels in their system. In other words, as a way to learn to manage your mind and body under conditions of stress. Now, if you are somebody who's using deliberate cold exposure, either cold showers or ice bas or cold emersion, I often get asked how best to breathe during those different type of activities.

Really, there's no best way to breathe. Although if you wanted to turn those activities into their own form of stress inoculation, again, please don't use sick lic prevenient and dangerous. I don't recommend IT whatsoever, but you can try to actively slow your breathing, that is, to make sure that you're engaging enya mic breathing.

Now, up until now, I said that rythm bc breathing is the default prevot singer nucleus controlling rythmic breathing is the default. And the doubling up on inhales and next sales is something that happens when you deliberately take over the action of robots in your complex. Now that's true ninety nine percent of the time.

However, there are certain conditions, such as conditions of heightened state of emotional arousal. And if you think about someone who's been crying often times theyll the double in hell XL this is, or triple in hills, or somebody he's very, very afraid it's all in hills. okay? So IT does sometimes happen spontaneously self, when we get into very cold water, there is a very rebus decrease in the activation of the prefrontal cortex, which is the area of brain real estate right behind the forehead, that controls structured thinking, your ability to reason and make sense of what's going on.

If you get into really cold water, you should not expect that brain region to work, or at least not work very well at all for the first twenty or thirty seconds that you're in the cold water from the time you get into cold water. Because he was time to deliberate cold exposure. I encourage you to try and control your breathing and make IT rythmic.

That is, inhales follow x sales, follow in hils, follow x sales, even if they have to be fast in hell, XL in hell, excell. why? Because the default, when we get into a stressful circumstance, emotionally in a physically stressful circumstance is that ethnic breathing stops and that para facial nucleus takes over.

And it's and it's that kind of panicking mode. And by simply controlling our breath again, even if it's fast from in hail to x hail and making sure that we're alternating inhales and x sales rythmical. And what you're fun is that you will be able to navigate that what would otherwise be a very stressful circumstance and make IT less stressed or maybe even pleasant.

And that skill definitely translates to other aspects of life in which know your hit square in the face with something stressful, you'll notice your breathing and your pattern of breathing switching to multiple inhales, or, you know, breath holding essentially departing from rythmic breathing. And by quickly returning to ethnic breathing, and maybe even trying to slow the breathing and extend those x sales, you'll find that you can very quickly calm down. Next, i'd like to discuss what I find to be an absolutely fascinating topic, is also one that's highly useful in the world, which is how your specific patterns of breathing relate to your ability to learn and to remember information, how we can moderate fear and a number of other aspects of how your brain functions.

This is a literature that's been reviewed recently in a lot of exquisite detail, in a beautiful review by jack feldman, who I mentioned earlier, one of the pioneers of the neuroscience of breathing, the title of the review is breathing rythm and pattern and their influence on emotion. Again, we'll provide a link to this review and the shown out captions. This review includes discussion of several studies, one in particular, that all get into in a bit of detail that describes the following.

Right now, I just want you to breathe regularly, meaning rithmetic ally. You can in hill and excel through your mouth or through your nose that prefer that you do IT through your nose because naseer, breathing, unless you need to breathe through your mouth because of heart exercise, are eating or talking is always going to be the Better way to go. Nasal breathing improves the esthetic of your face that's been shown.

We will talk about that just brief en in a few minutes. Nasal breathing improves the amount of oxy en you can bring into your system. Ate seat, seat.

okay. So just breathe in hill exile in hill exel and know that during your x sales, your pupil, that is, the people of your eye is getting bigger. And as you excel, it's getting smaller. In addition, when you inhale your reaction time to anything that happens around you, a car swing in front of you, something that you might detect in the periphery of your vision or hear off in the distance increases significantly compared to when you're x sAiling.

In addition, when you are inhaling your ability to remember things, especially things that take a bit of effort to and your ability to learn new information is significantly greater than IT is when you're excelling. Now as you hear all that, you're probably think, okay, how do I just in hill? Well, of course, that's not gonna.

The best approach you need to explain as well for all the reasons you now are well aware of. But what these findings really illustrate, and I should mention, these findings are all Carried out in humans, right? These relate to some stuff in animal stays.

But what I just described has been shown. In human studies, consistently, when we in hill, and in particular when we in hill through our nose, our brain is not functioning in the same way as when we excel. Now that doesn't mean that our brain is functioning in a deficient way when we exil IT just doesn't function as well as IT relates to memory retrieval, memory formation and some other aspects of cognition.

You might be asking, why in the world would this be? Well, I wasn't consulted that the design phase, and anyone that tells you that they were, you should back away from quickly. But one reasonable explanation for why are brain functions Better, at least in the context of what I just talked about when we inhale, is because the old factory system is actually the most ancient sensory system of all the sensory systems we have.

So before vision, before audition, before touch, before all of that, the factory system is the most ancient system. And the old factory system, of course, is designed to detect chemicals in the environment. And so if you imagine an early organism that perhaps we have vote from our, perhaps we did, but nonetheless, we share some features of, at least in terms of all factory function, in order to get that chemical information into the brain, we need to inhale.

You need to bring that information in. Now, for aquatic animals, they could take IT in through water, but for animals that are terrestrial, live on land, they would have to get in through the air. So inhaler tion, we know, activate certain regions of the so called period m court x are areas of the neo cortex that are more ancient, as well as increasing the activity of brain areas such as the hip campus, which is a brain area involved in learning a memory.

In fact, one of the studies that illustrates this most beautifully is a study that was polished in the journal neuroscience in two thousand sixteen. By the way, journal neuroscience is a very fine journal, and the title of this paper is natural aspiration and trains human olympic assocation and modulates cognitive function. This is a paper that followed up on an earlier paper that showed that when people breathe in through their nose, their recognition and their discrimination of different others was far greater than when they breathe through their mouth.

Now that was all was interesting, but I was also sort of a dub, because you smell things with your nose, not your mouth. You taste things with your mouth, and you speak with your mouth and bunch of all the things do with your mouth. But none's, that study pointed to the idea that the brain is different during natural installations versus nasim excl lations versus mouth inhalational versus acceleration.

What IT basic showed is that the brain ramp up its levels of activity. And that signal noise that we talk about earlier, you were call that ability for the brain to detect things in the environment is increased during installations. But because that earlier study focused on smell on all faction, there was a bit of a confound.

There was hard to separate out the variable. So this paper, the one I just mentioned, nasal respiration and trains human lymph consolations in modules cogan function, did not look at detection of others, rather IT looked at things like reaction time or fear. And basically what IT found is that reaction time is greatly reduced when people are inhaling.

So they had people look at fearful stimuli, look at their reaction time to fearfully muy. In other words, their ability to detect certain kinds of stimuli. They were given a lot different kinds of stimuli.

They had to be able to discriminate between one sort of that, excuse me, one, by the way, focus for those. Listen, just bumped the microwaving rather animated here. What the subjects had to do was detect one type of stimulus for another stimulus that they were being exposed to.

And what they found as if people were inhaling, as that fear inducing stimulus was presented, the reaction time to nose IT was much, much faster. And they related that to patterns of brain activity. And they were able to do that because they were actually recording from the brain directly from beneath the skull.

They were able do that because they had some patients. They had interpreted ual electrodes emda in their brain for sake of trying to detect epileptic seizures. So there's a lot to this study and a lot that we could discuss.

But the basic take away is that when people are inhaling, that is, when they're drawing iron through their nose, in particular, their ability to detect what's going on in the world around them is greatly enhanced, and not just for fear, but also for surprise of all sorts. So when people are inhaling, their ability to detect novel stimulus that are unexpected or that are unusual in their environment is significantly increased. Again, we'll put a link to this study as well.

I found IT to be one of the more interesting studies in this realm, although there are now many additional studies that support this statement that I made earlier, which is that during inhalation tion, also called inspiration, there are a number of very fast physiological changes, such as changes in pupil diameter, changes in the activity of the hippocampus, this memory encoding and retrieval area, the brain and other areas of the brain. So what's the tool take away from this if you are sitting down to read or research or study or you really want to learn some information, may be you're listen to a podcast or some other sort of information that you want to retain. IT actually makes sense to increase the duration or the intensity of your inhales.

As you do that, the more that you're inhaling relative to exhaling in terms of duration, the more that your brain is in this focus mode, in this mode of being able to access and retrieve information Better. Now there's one copy out to this that I think is important because I know a number of people listen to this podcast for sake of gleaning tools, not just for cognitive enhancement, but for physical enhancement. IT turns out that when you are inhaling air, you're actually less able, or I should say, less efficient at generating voluntary movements.

Now that might come as a surprise. You know, until now we basically been talking about innovation is great almost to the point where you wonder like this acceleration good for anything. You don't want to over breathe and kick out too much carbon oxide.

Well, of course, acceleration is great for things. In fact, if you're somebody lets play baseball or softball, or what do you told that you should x hail on the swing to generate the maximum amount of power? If you're somebody who has done martial arts of any kind with traditional western boxing as you strike, that's where people typically do the yeah classic, a type thing that's more of a movie thing.

I don't know where are not people are use, but in boxing, often times people will do that. Sh theyll do IT a rapid acceleration of forceful exhalation, keeping in mind again that inhales typically are active to engage the dramatic muscle that engage those intra muscles, whereas sales tend be passive unless we take active control of the excel. And indeed, our ability to generate fast directed, so called violation voluntary movements is greatly enhanced if we do them during the x hail, not the in hill.

Now with all of that said, I haven't yet really talked about mouth versus nasal breathing. And IT really can be a fairly short discussion, because what abundant data now show, and has been beautifully described in the book called jaws, a hidden epidemic. This is a book that was written by paul earlier and SAndra n.

My colleagues. Stanford school has an introduction in a forward from Jerry diamond and from the great Robert S. A. Le ski. So real heavy hitters on this book.

What that book really describes is that whenever possible, me, unless you're speaking or eating or your exercising, rather activities, require some change in your pattern of breathing. We should really all be striving to breathe through our nose, not through our mouth. And that relates to the increased resistance to breathing through the nose we talk about earlier.

Again, i'll say IT a third time. That increased resistance through the nose allows you to inflate your lungs more or not less. The other thing that breathing through your nose allows you to do is both warm and moist rises the air that you bring into your lungs, which is more favorable for long health.

Then breathing through the mouth, hard breathing through the mouth, or simply mouth breathing at all, is actually quite damaging, or can be, I should say, quite damaging to some of the respiratory functions of your lungs. That, of course, does not mean that you shouldn't read hard through your mouth when you're running or sprinting or exercising hard, but you don't want mouth breathing to be the chronic defauts pattern that you follow. Nasal breathing is the best pattern of breathing to follow as a default state.

Another aspect of nasal breathing is really beneficial is that the gas natural oxide is actually created in the nasal passages. It's a gas that can cause relaxation of the smooth muscles that relate to the vasculature, not just of your nose, but of your brain and for all the tissues of your body. This is why nasal breathing and not mouths breathing, is great for when you want to relieve congestion.

So a lot of these things seem counter intuit, right? You knows this stuff. So that mainly makes people breathe through their mouth. But turns out the breathing through your nose will allow some dilation of the vague latter. More blood float dillaway of the nasal passages and delivery of nitroxides to all the tissues of your body. And that dilution of the small capital ies that innovate essentially every organ of your body allow the delivery of more nutrient in the removal of carmody oxide and other waste products from those tissues more readily than if you're knock getting enough, excuse me, nta oxide into your system.

So a lot of reasons to be a nasal breathing if you want to check out their book, jaws, a hidden epidemics of terrific read and IT also shows some absolutely striking pictures, twin studies and so forth, and some foreign afghans of people, and the esthetic changes that they experience when they shifted from being a mouth breather to a nose breather. These are striking examples that have been observed over and over again when people mouth breathe. There's an an allegation of the job drupal ess of the of the islands.

And the entire jaw structure really changes in ways that are not aesthetically favorable. Fortunately, when people switch be coming nasal breathers. And of course, that takes some encouragement either by mouths taping or doing their cardiovascular erc's with mth close, or by doing the sorts of exercises that we talked about earlier when they switch to becoming nasal breathers by default.

The aesthetic changes that occur are very dramatic and very favorable, including you serve elevation of of the eyebrows, not not in an artificial sense, or in the kind of about rage's way, but elevation of the cheek bones, sharpening of the jaw, and most notably, improvements of the teeth and the entire jaw structure. In fact, one simple test of whether not you can be an efficient nail breather. And whether not you've been nasal breathing efficiently or most of the time in the past, or whether not you've been relying more on mouth breathing.

That was describing the book jaws. You should be able to close your mouth and breathe only through your nose. Again, this is at rest, not during exercise.

And necessarily, we might do during exercise, close your mouth, put your tones on the roof of your mouth, and you should fit behind your teeth. You should be able to nose, breathe in that position. And many people won't be able to do that.

But fortunately, as I mentioned earlier, if you nasal breathe, that is, you deliberately nasal breathe when IT rest for some period of time, you will experience an increase the ability to nasal breathe. And you should also experience some addition of space within the pilot, your mouth, to allow your tongue to sit more completely on the roof, your mouth. This is especially true for children that perform this technique.

Again, I refer you to the book the hidden fidem c it's an absolutely spectacular book. You can also just um look online before and after jaw's hidden epidemic and look at some of the changes in facial structure that occur when people move from mouth to azo breathing and it's really quite striking. So during today's episode per always, we covered a lot of information. First we talk about the mechanical aspects of breathing, the lungs, the dire frame, the tragedy and so forth.

We also talked about the chemical aspects of breathing that really breathing is a way that we bring oxygen ourselves and that we get the correct levels, or I should say, we maintain the correct levels of caring oxide in our system, neither too much nor too little, in order to allow oxygen to do its magic and to allow carbon dioxide to do its magic. Because as you learn during today's episode comment, dioxide is not just a waste byproduct. IT has very critical psychological functions.

You need to have enough of the around, and therefore you don't want to over breathe, especially at rest. We talked about a tool to measure, however you manage carbon oxide, called carbon dioxide tolerance test, and various exercises that you can use simply by breathing to decrease your stress in real time, decrease your stress chronically around the clock. Obviously, that's a good thing.

Improve sleep, improve mood, how to increase breath, hold times and why you might want to do that. Also, how to eliminate hiccups. We talk about how to breathe in order to eliminate the sides. Teachers, sidecar, mp, that you might experience during exercise and how to breathe in order to improve learning and memory, reaction time and various other aspects of cognitive and physical function. I do realize it's a lot of information, but as always, I try and give you information that is clear, hopefully interesting as well and actionable toward a number of different end points.

So if you're somebody that just now starting to think about the application of breath work, I would encourage you to please, yes, to do that carbon oxy tolerance test that will give you some window into how well or how poorly you're managing breathing. And then here's the great news. The great news is that breath work that is deliberate aspiration practices are very effective at creating change very quickly.

In some cases, such as the use of the physiological side or cyclical cup of ventilation, those changes can be experienced the first time and every time. Because again, these are not hacks. These are aspects of your breathing apparatus, I, including the mechanical stuff in the neural stuff and the gas exchange stuff, all of which you were born with, and that are available to you at any moment.

All you really have to do is explore them and deploy them as you feel necessary. If you're learning from and enjoying this podcast, please subscribed our youtube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribed to the podcast on spotify and apple.

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