I share my weekly deep thoughts around breathwork, mindfulness, and movement topics to improve your life and live more intentionally.
BreathNotes: The brain network that writes your bad days
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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 open the sign-up window. Now, back to the main topic... Your mind is somewhere else for almost half of your waking life. That number comes from a Harvard study by Killingsworth and Gilbert, published in Science in 2010. They pinged over 2,000 people at random moments throughout the day and asked what they were doing and what they were thinking about. Minds were wandering 47 percent of the time. And here is the part that matters. People were less happy when their minds were wandering, even when they wandered to pleasant things. The mind wandering has an address in the brain. It's called the default mode network, a set of regions that switches on whenever you're not focused on a task. Its job is storytelling. Replaying the conversation from this morning, rehearsing the one from tomorrow, comparing where you are to where you think you should be. Rumination, at the level of the brain, is this network running the same loop with the exhaust valve stuck shut. This is why you can't think your way out of your monkey brain. Analyzing the loop is the loop. You're asking the storyteller to stop telling stories, and it answers with another story. What actually works is a seesaw that neuroscientists have been mapping for a while now. In 2007, Norman Farb and colleagues at the University of Toronto put people in a scanner and compared two modes of self-awareness. Narrative focus, thinking about yourself, lit up the same midline regions the default mode network uses. Experiential focus, feeling the body in the present moment, quieted those regions and activated the insula, the part of the brain that reads internal body signals. One goes up, the other goes down. Attention out of the story means attention into the body, and the reverse. So the question becomes: How do you get attention into the body when the mind is loud? Quiet sensation won't do it in that moment. Yes, meditation can work. But often it takes too long, and the friction of sitting through the noisy mind is too strong. Feeling the subtle texture of a slow breath is a real skill, but reaching for it when your mind is in a spiral is like trying to hear a whisper at a concert. What I found works is the opposite move. Give the body something too loud to ignore. This is what Hormesis Breathing does in the first five minutes. 90 seconds of deep breathing offloads carbon dioxide and produces tingling in the hands, heat in the chest, a slight buzz behind the face. Then the exhale hold drops you into a stillness with real physical lightness to it. None of this is subtle. The spike in epinephrine (adrenaline) is strong enough that the storytelling network simply cannot talk over the bodily and mental sensations. You're not pushing the thoughts out. You're shifting the mental perspective by a deliberate neuro-chemical shift. Next time your mind-wandering is running uncontrolled, sit down somewhere safe and do three rounds of Hormesis Breathing, 90 seconds of deep breathing, filling up your whole lungs, followed by an exhale and hold (for 60 to 90 seconds), followed by a big inhale and shorter hold (10-30 seconds). Seated or lying down, never in water, never while driving. During the breath-hold scan your body and saturate your body parts with awareness. If you want a guided version of exactly this, I have full Hormesis Breathing session on my YouTube channel. Breathe along and try it out. Best, Kitaro
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Breathwork, Mindfulness and Movement Coach and Creator
I share my weekly deep thoughts around breathwork, mindfulness, and movement topics to improve your life and live more intentionally.
Hey friends, When people ask me how to do Hormesis Breathing, they usually mean the deep breaths and the holds. That's the exciting part, I get it. But when I sit down to design a session, that part gets maybe a third of my attention. The rest goes into how I bring you in, and how I bring you out. I want to walk you through how I think about that, because once you see the shape, you don't need my voice anymore. You can build your own. Getting in I never start with breathing. I start with...
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,...
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...