How to control stress in Real-Time

An ability to control your levels of stress in real time is extremely powerful. It turns out you can do this using physiology and neuroscience. Your breathing can directly impact your heart rate and your level of stress, or calm. 

Here’s how it’s works. When you inhale, your diaphragm moves down. This creates more space in your thoracic cavity, and your heart actually gets a little bigger. As a result, the rate of blood flow through that larger heart volume slows down. 

A signal is sent from a group of neurons on your heart called the sinoatrial node. That signal goes up to the brain, and your brain sends a signal to speed the heart up. In other words, inhaling speeds your heart rate up. 

The opposite is true as well. When you exhale, your diaphragm moves up, your heart gets a little bit smaller because there’s a little bit less space in your thoracic cavity. As a result, blood flows more quickly through that smaller volume. 

The sinoatrial node registers that and signals your brain, and the brain signals to slow the heart down. So, in other words, inhaling speeds your heart rate up. Exhaling slows your heart rate down. 

So if you want to speed up your heart rate and be more alert, inhale more or make those inhales more vigorous, more intense, if you want to calm down, you can do that quickly by making your exhales slightly longer than your inhales or making them more vigorous. 

This doesn’t require any breath work. This is something that you can do in real time, and that’s what’s called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. That’s the technical phrase. It’s also the basis of what’s called heart rate variability, or HRV. 

But all you need to remember is inhaling deeper and longer will speed your heart rate up. Exhaling. Longer and more intensely will slow your heart rate down and will allow you to calm down in real time. 

Billions of people suffer from stress. And there are tools to combat stress that involve things like meditation, breath work, good nutrition, good social connections, and avoiding all bad things in life.

And while those are powerful, the problem is they require that people step away from the stress inducing activity. My lab and other laboratories have been very interested in developing tools that allow us to push back on stress.

Feel more calm in real time, meaning without having to disengage from the stress-inducing activity. The best way that I am aware of doing that is called the physiological sigh. A physiological sigh is a pattern of breathing that involves two inhales followed by an extended exhale.

Physiological sighs were discovered in the 1930s as a pattern of breathing that people go into spontaneously when they are in claustrophobic environments or in deep sleep. When there's a buildup of a gas called carbon dioxide in the bloodstream, carbon dioxide triggers the impulse to breathe.

There are neurons in the brain that know when carbon dioxide levels have gotten too high. And when the levels get too high, they trigger inhale and exhale, or double inhale and exhale. Now, you can do physiological size voluntarily.

Anytime you're feeling too stressed and you want to feel more calm, you do it like this. So it's a double inhale. And typically the first inhale is longer than the second, but the second one is still important to do, and then a very long extended exhale.

Typically, both inhales are through the nose and the exhale is through the mouth. That's the most effective way to do the physiological side. However, if you can't breathe through your nose or your mouth, for whatever reason, do it throughout your mouth or throughout your nose.

The second inhale is really important because your lungs are not just two big bags of air. They're two big bags of air with lots of little sacks, millions of sacks. And if you were to lay out those sacks, their volume is as big as a tennis court.

And that allows both the intake of more oxygen, but also the offload of carbon dioxide. So when you do the double inhale, it re-inflates any of these little sacks that have collapsed, and in doing so, it allows you to offload more carbon dioxide.