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 for a small, deliberate dose of stress that makes a system stronger. A heavy bar does it for muscle. A few minutes of this breathing does it for your nervous system.

Why stress yourself at all

Most of us don't lack stress. We lack the full cycle. Our ancestors met the tiger, got a hard spike of fight or flight, escaped, and then fully recovered. We get a low background hum instead. Deadlines, notifications, too many inputs. That hum keeps the stress side slightly switched on all day and runs on cortisol, the slow, long-lasting stress hormone. Chronic cortisol keeps inflammation high, and inflammation-related diseases are now linked to more than half of all deaths worldwide.

"Just avoid stress" rarely works. Tell it to two working parents raising three kids. Some stress you have to go through. So the better question is how to handle it better and recover from it faster. You train that the way you train anything else, by being under load on purpose, at a dose you control.

What the research found

In a 2014 study from Radboud University in the Netherlands, people trained this style of breathing for about 10 days (together with cold exposure and meditation). Then they were injected with a bacterial toxin that normally triggers a strong immune reaction. During the breathing, their adrenaline climbed higher than in first-time bungee jumpers. Their main anti-inflammatory messenger rose almost 200% more than in the untrained group, the inflammatory messengers were roughly cut in half, and they reported fewer flu-like symptoms.

A session works in two directions. The deep breathing pushes the stress side up. The hold after the exhale drops you into the recovery side. Because you breathed off a lot of carbon dioxide (the gas that creates the urge to breathe), the hold stays quiet for a long time. Spike, then deep recovery. That's a workout for your nervous system.

The three details that make it work

Here is where most people go wrong. They follow a random video, breathe fast and shallow, and finish more anxious than when they started. I taught the Wim Hof Method for five years, and these are the details I changed.

1.) Full breaths, not fast ones. Breathe into the belly first, then the ribs, then up into the chest until you feel it under the collarbones. Let it go with a big sigh. The more you release on the exhale, the easier the next full breath gets. To find your pace, speed up on purpose for a few breaths. At some point the breath starts in the throat and stays in the upper chest. That's your limit. Stay just below it.

2.) Don't squeeze the air out before the hold. Pushing the lungs empty creates a vacuum in the chest. The body tenses up, and tension burns oxygen and ends your hold early. Just let the last breath fall out and stop where the exhale ends on its own.

3.) Relax into the hold. Let your attention travel through your body and soften every muscle it touches. This is where the meditation lives. You may notice warmth, tingling, a quieter mind. Stay as long as it's comfortable, never forced.

One full session

1.) Take 30 to 40 full breaths, about 75 to 90 seconds.

2.) Let the last breath fall out and hold. Anywhere from 40 seconds to 3 minutes. Start short; it gets longer each round.

3.) When the urge to breathe arrives, take one deep breath in and hold it for 10 to 15 seconds with gentle pressure in the belly. Don't push the pressure up into your head.

4.) Let go and start the next round. Three to five rounds is one session.

Always sit or lie down. Never practice in water, while driving, or anywhere a blackout could hurt you.

I practice in the morning to ride the natural rise in alertness. On nights when my head won't switch off, a slow session lying in bed works well for sleep. And when I need a burst of energy before a talk or the last set of a hard workout, 30 seconds of full, fast breaths followed by one hold on full lungs does the job.

In the video, I show all of this live, including what it looks and sounds like when the breath tips from full into shallow, and how different a relaxed hold feels from a squeezed one. Watch it here:

Breathe well,
Kitaro

P.S. Check out this video if you want a follow-along version of each step.

Ready to go deeper?​ ⭐️ Join Breath Rituals to reset your nervous system: https://www.skool.com/breath-rituals/about ​ ➡️ Live WEEKLY video sessions with Kitaro, structured courses and guided sessions UPDATED WEEKLY, exclusive live cohort courses for members only, 100+ guided breathing & meditation videos, a breathwork configurator to build your own breathing sessions, and a very strong breathwork community so we can all cultivate a habit of health, balance, and spiritual growth!

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