The fastest way to reduce stress

Breathing.

Something that seems so natural and simple and yet apparently we're all doing it completely wrong. Most people don't know how to breathe, you're probably breathing wrong. 95% of you are breathing wrong. you've been breathing wrong your entire life. Okay, so people say a lot of things on the internet but today we're going to talk about breathing, breath work, and what the science says.

First, is there a proper way to breathe in everyday life that can optimize your body and brain or hurt you if you're not doing it right? Second, can practicing breathwork make you a healthier less anxious, and happier person? And finally, we're going to finish with a really simple breathing trick that has been shown experimentally to calm down the nervous system and minimize stress within seconds to minutes.

Let's quickly understand what's happening to your body when you breathe apart from the oxygen entering into your bloodstream and being taken around your body to your cells and CO2 and other waste gas leaving your Body. When you breathe out every time you breathe you activate a lot of nerves in your body. Breathe in and the sympathetic nervous system is activated. Your heart rate increases and noradrenaline is released which can perk you up and breathe out and the parasympathetic system gets triggered which relaxes the body.

Every time you breathe in, your diaphragm moves down and stretches the heart a little making it bigger this means the blood travels a little more slowly and your brain sends a signal to speed up your heart rate. whenever you breathe out the heart gets a little smaller pushing the blood through faster and the Brain tells the heart to slow down a little because of this mechanism. Focusing on your out-breath can bring down your heart rate and bump your parasympathetic activity ultimately calming you down. When you focus on slowly breathing there's evidence it can even increase the activity of the neurotransmitter Gaba in your brain which further calms down nerves.

Now research has found when it comes to emotional regulation, breath work may be more effective than something like mindful meditation. One the study had four different breath work groups studied: One that breathed in and out equally using something called box breathing, one that focused on longer inhales, one that focused on longer exhales, and finally the mindful meditation group as a control which didn't focus on their breathing, they would spend 5 minutes a day doing this for a month.

The study found that while all groups saw Improvement the breath work groups felt more positive less stressed and less anxious than the control but the group that performed best was the long exhale group. This type of breathing is called cyclic sighing which we'll go over later. in the study, this group's breathing actually ended up slowing down the most suggesting they were the most physically relaxed not just while they were the breathing, their average respiratory rate over the month went down and many studies have found similar results when it comes to overall stress mood and anxiety levels.

But it's important to take a step back and emphasize that the effect size of this wasn't monumental. it's not like the subjects suddenly became the happiest people you know just that there is a measurable Improvement that makes you feel better which makes the next claim a little more surprising. Breathing exercises have been found to help with things like depression and PTSD. In these cases, the subjects worked with therapists or very focused breathing workshops that they would take for a week and then continued on their own for 20 minutes a day over 6 weeks.

In these instances, depression scores dropped significantly. A study on US veterans found breathwork techniques to be as effective as traditional therapy in reducing PTSD though, it is important to note that some of these studies included faster breathing techniques that weren't just focused on slow exhales. Now are you breathing through your mouth or your nose take a second to check in general. It's suggested that nose breathing is better.

Some studies show it provides more oxygen because the higher resistance in the nose allows you to actually inflate the lungs more but your nose also has a better capacity to protect against infection after all you've got nose hairs and membranes to help moisturize and warm up the air before it goes to your lungs. Mouth breathing at night can also cause issues you're more likely to snore trigger sleep apnea where you stop breathing at night and get an extremely dry mouth. Less saliva can impact your teeth health as well some research even suggests that mouth breathing over long periods, especially for kids can change your face shape.

So, in general, physicians do recommend you focus on nose breathing if you can but of course, most people are switching back and forth between them especially depending on your activity level at the moment. If you're an average person without any specific breathing issues you're probably already balancing the two pretty well so don't hyper-fixate on this. just know that nose breathing is generally considered a better breathing exercise and can also improve your sleep this has even been found in studies on at-risk kids who were given mindfulness training and breath work techniques. This study was not even about sleeping or telling the kids how to improve their sleep but the result from the practices had them sleeping an hour more on average and when measuring their brain waves saw a marked improvement in REM sleep which is critical for brain development.

We even see improvements in memory this claim gets made a lot and I find the evidence a little less compelling but it's still worth mentioning research has shown examples of people retaining more information when nose breathing than mouth breathing, when doing breath work that focuses on more rigorous inhalation. Some studies have found that memory and reaction times improve so if you're studying or trying to learn maybe make a breath work focus on inhalation and the sympathetic nervous system as opposed to trying to calm down the system.