Breathing is Medicine

by ElizabethNew Frontier of Health, Video

I want to talk about the simple but powerful thing that you can do for your health. This is probably the most powerful thing and the easiest thing to do that can affect your health both now and in the long term. And it’s something that you have at your disposal all the time. In fact, if you don’t do this, you will die. And that thing is breathing.

Breathing for Life

Your breath turns out to be an incredibly powerful way to regulate your entire body’s health.

You think about it as just breathe in, lungs, nose, lungs, nose, and that’s all. But obviously, the oxygen that we take in makes a difference for our whole body. But more than that, there are ways to breathe which specifically turn off the sympathetic nervous system. And for those of you who don’t know what the sympathetic nervous system is, I’ll just give you a quick overview.

The sympathetic nervous system is your fight or flight response, and it’s necessary. We need it to get ourselves out of danger, but when it’s on all the time, it leads to things like heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, poor wound healing, abnormal immune system, chronic pain, low hormone levels, et cetera.

There is nothing in the body that is made better by having this sympathetic nervous system on all the time. But the sad truth that matter is, for most people wandering around, the sympathetic nervous system is on all the time, and we don’t recognize it. Like we don’t. As someone who now learned how to regulate that, I see it in people everywhere, everywhere I go. 90+ percent of people are living in a state of fight or flight, fear and panic all the time and you can change that.

Change your physical health, change your emotional state with simple tools of breath.

So I’m going to teach you one quick way that you can regulate your breath that has been proven to decrease the amount of fight or flight hormones that you have. There are so many, I could spend hours teaching different breath techniques. But the idea behind most of these techniques is to use and breathe through all of the lungs. Most of us breathe up here in the chest when we breathe and there’s lots of tightness. It’s the least efficient part of our lungs.

This upper part of the lungs doesn’t get as much blood flow as the lower part of the lungs and it’s only like a little part of the lungs.

Taking long, deep, intentional breathes actually makes an enormous difference for your health. It gets you more oxygen and specifically turns on your natural repair system. The mere act of breathing and moving the diaphragm, the great big muscle that’s at the bottom of your lungs, moving that up and down actually triggers your repair systems, what’s called the para-sympathetic nervous system.

Square Breath

All right, enough talk, let me teach you one easy way that you can practice and that is called “square breath”, it’s got other names but we will use “square breath. It’s basically a breath in for four counts, not super fast, not super slow.

Hold the breath for four counts; breathe out for four counts, hold the breath out for four counts.

So let’s do it together right now.

Breath in..2..3..4..hold..2..3..4..exhale..2..3..4..hold..2..3..4. We’ll do it again. In..2..3..4..hold..2..3..4..exhale..2..3..4..hold..2..3..4. And that’s as easy as it gets.

Now you can’t just do two rounds and say “ooh! I’m better”. But breathing is something we do all the time, and if we are breathing most of the time in ways that damage our health or that is a detriment to our health, it makes sense just to practice doing breathing a little differently.

Conscientious breathing like the square breath is one way to do it. It is not the only way, people can spend time doing like deep belly breath so that you see your abdomen expand on the inhale and contract on the inhale. There are alternate nostril breathing techniques, all sorts of ways to do it.

I guess my way isn’t any better, well, this way definitely isn’t any better than any other way. But my challenge for you is to consciously use this amazing tool that you have that can affect your health and put it into practice in your life. So it’s not just a few minutes when you watched this video, but it’s something that you conscientiously do, sitting in the car, standing in line at the grocery, pumping gas, sitting on the phone while you’re sitting on hold.

Find those little times when you can practice, intentional, slow, regulated, full lung breathing. You will be amazed what happens to your health when you do that.