I share my weekly deep thoughts around breathwork, mindfulness, and movement topics to improve your life and live more intentionally.
Explore Your Stress Response: 4 Breathing Principles
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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, diabetes) are linked to more than half of all deaths today. But there's a cost that's harder to measure. Stressful days go by faster, and you remember less of them. You're alive, but you're not really there. Most of us blame the outside for it. The job, other people, the news. And the advice we get is always the same. Calm down, take a deep breath. That works for one kind of stress. For the other three, it does nothing, or it makes things worse. Why your breath can change your state at all Your breathing is run by the same automatic system that runs your heartbeat and your digestion. You can't steer your heart directly. But you can steer your breath, and your heart follows. When you breathe in strongly, your heart rate goes up a little. When you breathe out slowly, it comes down. So the inhale is a gas pedal. The exhale is a brake. Every breathing technique in the world is some mix of the two. That's why I stopped asking which technique is best. The better question is what this stress needs right now. More gas, or more brake? Two questions Do I have too much energy right now, or too little? Wired or drained. Do I need to do something, or do I need to rest? The answers point to four principles. 1. Wired and need to act. Calming. Before a big talk, a meeting, a hard conversation. Most people jump straight to slow breathing, but the body is still racing and it doesn't follow. I learned this in daily ice baths. When the cold shock hits, you can't go slow right away. So start at the speed you're already breathing and put the nervous energy into full breaths. Then make each exhale a little longer, breath by breath. Then slow the inhale down too. If you want to add one more layer, try a double inhale before each long exhale. This is called the physiological sigh. In a Stanford study, five minutes a day of this pattern for a month improved mood and lowered people's breathing rate at rest. 2. Wired and can't settle. Transmuting. Restless, anxious, checking your phone, nowhere to put the energy. Here calming feels like a drop of water on a hot stove. So don't fight the energy. Use it. I use Hormesis Breathing for this. About 90 seconds of deep, fast breaths where all the restlessness goes into the breath. Then breathe out and hold as long as it feels comfortable. When the urge to breathe gets strong, breathe in fully and hold for 10 to 15 seconds. Three or four rounds, and I come out awake, calm and grounded. Always sit or lie down for this, and never do it while driving or in water. 3. Drained but need to perform. Energizing. The 3 pm dip. The last set in the gym. Here, slow breathing makes things worse, because you need the gas pedal. Take 10 to 15 big breaths, filling the belly first and then opening the ribs to all sides. Then take one full breath in, hold it for a moment, and let it go with a big sigh. I call this power breathing, and it's what I reach for when I'm foggy and have just a few minutes before I need to show up. 4. Drained and done for the day. Rejuvenating. You lie down exhausted, and your mind keeps going. This might be the most common stress of all, and almost nobody treats it on purpose. Your body already wants to slow down, so help it. Breathe in for six seconds and out for six seconds, and add a slow body scan from head to feet. Feel the shape, the weight and the warmth of each part. The slow breath calms the body. The body scan takes the mind away from the day. Principles over techniques Traditional martial arts taught me this a long time ago. Beginners collect techniques. Advanced students collect principles. Four principles do the work of fifty techniques. And there's a side effect I didn't expect. Asking the two questions forces you to notice how you actually feel before you pick a breath. Over time, you get much better at reading your own state. I can't always change what stresses me, but I can always change how I respond to it. In the video, I demonstrate each of the four so you can breathe along with me: [LINK] Breathe well,
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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...
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...
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