I share my weekly deep thoughts around breathwork, mindfulness, and movement topics to improve your life and live more intentionally.
The gas your sinuses make & how to rise it by 15x
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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 instead of moving smoothly, and that oscillation dramatically speeds up the exchange of air between the sinuses and the nasal cavity, carrying far more of the nitric oxide already sitting in the sinus lining out into the airstream. So why does that matter for anything happening below your nose? Nitric oxide is one of the few molecules with a Nobel Prize attached to it. Robert Furchgott, Louis Ignarro and Ferid Murad won the 1998 prize in medicine for showing that this gas, produced inside the lining of blood vessels, is what tells the smooth muscle in the vessel wall to relax. Relaxed vessel walls mean a wider channel and more blood moving through it. That's the whole mechanism behind vasodilation, and it works the same way whether the vessel sits in a fingertip or feeds a region of the brain. Let's couple that finding with another powerful breathing pattern: the physiological sigh. A 2023 Stanford trial put 111 people through five minutes a day of one of several breathing patterns for a month, cyclic sighing among them, against a control group doing daily mindfulness meditation. Everyone felt somewhat calmer. But the cyclic sighing group, breathing defined by a long, extended exhale, gained noticeably more daily positive mood than the meditation group did. Slower breathing, not stiller sitting, moved the needle further. Put the two together, and each half of a session like this has a specific job. Coherence breathing, six seconds in and six seconds out, sets a steady baseline your nervous system can settle into. Additionally, this slow breathing pattern has been shown to reduce inflammation and engage the parasympathetic nervous system. The extra sip of air at the top of the inhale reopens alveoli for better oxygen uptake. The hum on the exhale is what multiplies nitric oxide. And a few cyclic sighs layered through the session are what appear to move mood more than sitting quietly does. If you want to feel this rather than just read about it, I built a full guided session around exactly this combination. Best, PS: If you want to build your own version, the free breath configurator inside my new community, Breath Rituals, lets you set the ratio, add or remove the hum, and adjust it to your comfort level. Yours for life once you join, whether you stay a month or a year. ⬇️
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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.
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