Hey friends, Before we dive into today's topic, I just wanted to say that I uploaded a video to my YouTube channel that will only be up for 48 hours. If you want to check it out before it's gone, you can watch it here. Now, to today's topic. "Take a deep breath" fixes one kind of stress. There are four. Some estimates link around 70 percent of doctor visits to stress. Stress also drives inflammation in the body, and diseases that come with chronic inflammation (heart disease, stroke, cancer,...
14 days ago • 4 min read
Hi friend, Your heart speeds up a little every time you breathe in and slows down every time you breathe out. It is doing that right now, second by second. You can't tell your heart what to do. But you can tell your breath, and the breath is wired into both sides of your nervous system. The stress side (fight or flight) and the recovery side (rest and digest). Change the breath on purpose and you steer the whole system. That is the idea behind Hormesis Breathing. Hormesis is a biological term...
25 days ago • 4 min read
Sitting still and breathing normally, your blood is already about 97% saturated with oxygen. Breathe as deep and hard as you like, and the best you'll reach is 100%. That's a rounding error. It changes almost nothing about how you feel. So breathwork was never about oxygen. It's about carbon dioxide. We're taught CO2 is waste. It's actually the signal your body uses to run your breathing. The burning in a breath hold isn't low oxygen; it's rising CO2. And CO2 decides how much oxygen your...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
A while ago a coaching student asked me a practical question. What's the minimum amount of deliberate breathing that still works? Enough to clear the head a little and make a slightly better decision. I think he expected me to say five minutes, maybe ten. Some protocol he could fit between meetings. The answer is one breath. Between the thing that happens to you and the thing you do next, there's a gap. Most people rush straight through it. But your relationships, your biggest decisions and...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
A quiet exhale and a humming exhale are not the same breath. Hum while you exhale, and your nasal nitric oxide rises about fifteen times higher. That number comes from a 2002 study by Eddie Weitzberg and Jon Lundberg, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. They measured nitric oxide at the nostril during quiet exhalation and again during humming, and the difference was not subtle, close to a fifteen-fold increase. Humming makes the airflow oscillate...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hey friends, Many people think that deliberate breathing or a breathwork practice is just a morning routine or a session you do here and there to feel good, to get this blissful sensation. But a full breathwork practice involves much more. There are the following categories that should be included in a holistic breathing practice: An activating process Calming / Recovery pathways Breathing for in-the-moment Respiration health for overall good breathing function And your practice should evolve...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
The faster you run a breathing practice, the less it teaches you. That sounds backwards. We tend to treat intensity as the active ingredient. Bigger breaths, longer holds, more rounds. But there's a skill underneath every technique that only develops at low speed, and it's the one that decides whether the techniques work at all. That skill is sensing. Feeling the breath move, feeling where it lands in the body, noticing the shift from one state to another while it's still happening. Here's...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Before I get to the main topic of today's BreathNotes newsletter, I want to mention that I will soon open up my next cohort course. This time, the cohort will be a 5-week intensive on embodied breathing. It's a deep dive into the integration of breath, mind, and movement drawn from my 20-year experience as a traditional martial arts and qigong teacher. We will start in August (the exact dates will be announced soon). If you're interested, be sure to join the waitlist to be notified when I...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Andrew Huberman popularized a breathing technique now known as the physiological sigh or cyclic sighing. It's a double inhale followed by a long exhale. And today, I don't want to focus primarily on the physiological sigh itself (as I've already covered this technique multiple times). I want to focus on diaphragm-led vs. throat-led breathing and why it's important to know the difference. The second inhale at the top of a physiological sigh is not really a technique. It is a test. If your...
4 months ago • 3 min read