RSA

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Better Attention, Lasting Joy, and How to Age Successfully (in 5 min)

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4 Thoughts



1. How to Age Successfully, in Just 5 Minutes

“As such, DSB [deep and slow breathing] represents a practical, low-cost exercise that can be performed anywhere in order to promote successful aging.” <—sounds good to me 😊

- Nature Scientific Reports 2021

This study found that just 5 minutes of slow breathing at 6 bpm (4 in/6 out) increased HRV and reduced anxiety in younger and older adults.

The conclusion: Breathe slower, age better.

2. Why Slowing Down Leads to Better Attention

“But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. ‘That’s why those disciplines make you smarter. It’s not about humming or wearing orange robes.’ Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”

- Johann Hari, (inset quote Guy Claxton), Stolen Focus

A broad range of studies shows that when we do any practice that slows us down—whether it’s breathing, yoga, or tai chi—our attention improves.

Here we learn why: we’re moving at a pace “compatible with human nature.”

Slowness nurtures attention. Speed shatters it.

3. The Confidence Cycle: How to Get Good at Breathing

In The Confidence Gap, Russ Harris provides 4 steps to “get good at doing anything” <— 🙏 Here they are, with my wording to apply them to breathing:

  1. Practice the skills: Consistently practice the breathing techniques that interest you. You have to practice to get good—no way around it.

  2. Apply them effectively: Test them out in real life. Apply them when you’re stressed at work, before a presentation, or before sleep.

  3. Assess the results: Did they actually help? Did they make things worse? (I can’t tell you how many times breathing didn’t do anything for me, or how many times it was a life-saver. Find what works for you.)

  4. Modify as needed: Make changes based on what worked well and what didn’t.

Then, of course, repeat the cycle—but only for the rest of your life : )

4. A Secret to Finding Lasting Joy with Your Breathwork Practice

One day, we’ll think we’ve found the answer to our problems with slow breathing. Then, we might become obsessed with Wim Hof. Until, of course, we discover that alternate nostril breathing is what we’ve been missing 😂

But here’s the secret: that’s actually the point. It’s the endless ways we can use our breath that make it so special.

So let’s celebrate how wonderful it is that there’s a breath for everything. That our practice can change as we change. And let’s use it in our lives in whatever way is right in this moment, happily knowing that it won’t last forever.


1 QUOTE

“The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy.”

- Abraham Maslow

1 ANSWER

Category: Heart Rate Variability

Answer: The discovery that pulse rate varies with the breathing cycle was first reported by Stephen Hales in this year.

…

(Cue the Jeopardy! music.)

…

Question: What is 1733?

In good breath,

Nick Heath, T1D, PhD
“Breathing is the compound interest of health & wellness.”

P.S. Most people don’t realize this

 
 

* An asterisk by a quote indicates that I listened to this book on Audible. Therefore, the quotation might not be correct, but is my best attempt at reproducing the punctuation based on the narrator’s pace, tone, and pauses.

Sign Up For The Breathing 411

Each Monday, I curate and synthesize information from scientific journals, books, articles, and podcasts to share 4 thoughts, 1 quote, and 1 answer (like "Jeopardy!") related to breathing. It’s a fun way to learn something new each week.

 
 
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Values and Goals, Diverse Tactics, and 3 Shared Benefits of 15 Studies

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If you enjoy listening, you can subscribe to the audio version on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Audible so you don’t even have to look at the email 😊

 

4 Thoughts



1. Presto, Instant Success: Breathing (and life) Values vs. Goals

“Values are ‘desired qualities of ongoing action.’ In other words, your values describe how you want to behave as a human being: how you want to act on an ongoing basis,

[…]

Goals are ‘desired outcomes.’ In other words, goals are what you want to get, complete, possess, or achieve. Goals are not ongoing. The moment you achieve a goal, you can tick it off the list;”

- Russ Harris, The Confidence Gap

This is a beautiful distinction between values and goals. And it highlights why we should focus on breathing values (nasal, quiet, deep, etc.) over goals.

Goals come and go, but values are always there. As Harris says, “in any moment, we can act on our values—yes, even if we’ve neglected them for years. Presto, instant success!”

Thus, anytime we act on our breathing values, no matter how long we’ve neglected them, we are instantly successful. So let’s do that, right now : )

2. Slow Breathing and Better Psychological Outcomes: 3 Shared Benefits of 15 Studies

After analyzing 15 studies, this systematic review found 3 common effects of slow breathing that were associated with positive mental outcomes:

  1. Improved heart rate variability

  2. Increased respiratory sinus arrhythmia

  3. Enhanced alpha and decreased theta brainwave activity

The Take-Home Message: Breathe slowly, enhance HRV & RSA, modify brainwave activity, and feel better.

3. Diverse Tactics: The Benefits of Learning Many Methods

“So why learn to breathe other ways? Well, imagine just strolling. You can get most places and enjoy the outdoors with that stroll. But what if you want to cover ground quickly? Then you run. Or you want to reach a high tree branch. Then you jump. … For special purposes we need to learn special patterns of breathing…that fit the challenge of the moment.” (my emphasis)

- Gurucharan Singh Khalsa, Ph.D., and Yogi Bhajan, Ph.D.,

Breathwalk

We don’t need any fancy breathing to optimize our health (quiet & nasal will do most of the work). But, as we’re reminded here, there are many ways we can use our breath for various tasks and to reach different states.

Remember, “For special purposes we need to learn special patterns of breathing…that fit the challenge of the moment.”

So here’s to keeping an open mind and learning a diverse set of methods so we can always match our breath to our challenge, mixed-breathing artist style.

4. Two More Tiny (but hopefully useful) Thoughts on Methods

  1. If you know only one breathing method, then you really know none; if you understand one breathing method, then you really know them all.

  2. Every method works when used correctly, but no method works for everybody.


1 QUOTE

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. … There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

1 ANSWER

Category: Evolution

Answer: These are our most recent structure evolutionarily, developing roughly 350-400 million years ago.

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(Cue the Jeopardy! music.)

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Question: What are the lungs?

In good breath,

Nick Heath, T1D, PhD
“Breathing is the compound interest of health & wellness.”

P.S. & I think that’s where my anxiety started

 
 

* An asterisk by a quote indicates that I listened to this book on Audible. Therefore, the quotation might not be correct, but is my best attempt at reproducing the punctuation based on the narrator’s pace, tone, and pauses.

Sign Up For The Breathing 411

Each Monday, I curate and synthesize information from scientific journals, books, articles, and podcasts to share 4 thoughts, 1 quote, and 1 answer (like "Jeopardy!") related to breathing. It’s a fun way to learn something new each week.

 
 

Heart and Breath, plus the Best Breathing (and life) Advice I’ve Read

 
 

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If you enjoy listening, you can subscribe to the audio version on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Audible so you don’t even have to look at the email 😊

 
 
 

4 Thoughts


1. The Best Breathing (and life) Advice I’ve Ever Read

After reviewing tons of scientific papers, reading books, taking classes, and on & on, here’s the best breathing advice I’ve ever read:

“All this is literary, over-simplified, but we breathe as best we can.” - Samuel Beckett

We’ll never fully understand it. They’ll be inconsistent results. New discoveries. Revised approaches. But it’s all “literary, over-simplified.”

So, we just “breathe as best we can” with what we know.

***

P.S. Want the best life advice? Replace “breathe” with “live.” 🙂

2. Happy Valentine’s Day: 14 Loving Quotes on the Breath-Heart Connection

1. “Happiness lies in your own heart. You only need to practice mindful breathing for a few seconds, and you'll be happy right away.”

- Thich Nhat Hanh

 

2. “You know that our breathing is the inhaling and exhaling of air. The organ which serves for this is the lungs which lie round the heart. Thus breathing is a natural way to the heart.”

- Nicephorus the Solitary

 3. “If you would foster a calm spirit, first regulate your breathing; for when that is under control, the heart will be at peace; but when breathing is spasmodic, then it will be troubled.”

- Kariba Ekken

Keep going…

3. Story Follows State: Change Your Breath to Change the Messages Sent to the Brain

“We live a story that originates in our on autonomic state, is sent through autonomic pathways from the body to the brain, and is then translated by the brain into the beliefs that guide our daily living. The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.”*

- Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy

“The mind narrates what the nervous system knows.” <— 🤯

And the fastest way to access the nervous system? The breath.

Change your breath, change your state, change your mind, change your story.

4. What Does All of this Mean in Real Life?

“So what does this mean for us? We can use our breath whenever we experience a stressful event. […] It's the most accessible tool you have, and it's invisible. You can practice breathing for well-being no matter where you are without anyone noticing.”*

- Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track

That’s a perfect description of what all this breathing education means in real life. Of course, it won’t fix everything, but it’s the most accessible tool we have.

Let’s make it our ally.

 
 
 
 

1 QUOTE

“The greatest thing, then, in all of education, is to make our nervous system our ally as opposed to our enemy.”

- William James

 
 
 
 

1 ANSWER

Category: Breathing and the Heart

Answer: This is the fundamental link between heart and breath, signifying the increase in heart rate during inhalation and decrease during exhalation.

…

(Cue the Jeopardy! music.)

…

Question: What is respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)?

In good breath,

Nick Heath, T1D, PhD
“Breathing is the compound interest of health & wellness.”

P.S. Really incredible what the human body is capable of

 
 
 

* An asterisk by a quote indicates that I listened to this book on Audible. Therefore, the quotation might not be correct, but is my best attempt at reproducing the punctuation based on the narrator’s pace, tone, and pauses.

Sign Up For The Breathing 411

Each Monday, I curate and synthesize information from scientific journals, books, articles, and podcasts to share 4 thoughts, 1 quote, and 1 answer (like "Jeopardy!") related to breathing. It’s a fun way to learn something new each week.

 
 

Two Regulatory Effects of Breathing (+ James Nestor Breathing Q&A)

 
 

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” - Marcus Aurelius

 
 
 

You probably hate Zoom meetings by now. In fact, if you work in an office setting, you’re probably just tired of meetings in general. But every now and then, you have a truly important meeting. You prepare, rehearse, read, dress nice, and do everything you can to show up ready. 

Physiologically, we step into one of these “truly important meetings” approximately 25,000 times per day…no big deal, I know :) And we can choose how well we prepare for each one. We can send messages of calm, focus, and relaxation, or messages of anxiety, stress, and arousal.  

Whichever we choose, the messages we send with our breathing regulate many aspects of our health and well-being.  

How? Well, the answer to that is complex because breathing interacts with many systems of the body simultaneously (as we learned last week). But, the paper I am sharing this week goes through two significant regulatory effects of breathing.

 
 
 
 

Modulatory Effects of Respiration

Published in Autonomic Neuroscience: Basic and Clinical (2001)

Click Here to Read the Full Summary

 
 
 
 

The two main takeaways from this study are:

(1) Breathing modulates the cardiovascular system through respiratory sinus arrhythmia  

(2) Specific breathing patterns can reduce our chemosensitivity to carbon dioxide and hypoxia


1. Breathing and the Cardiovascular System

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) measures how breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure all interact. Put simply, RSA is the increase in your heart rate as you inhale and the decrease in your heart rate as you exhale. RSA is thought to be an index of vagal activity and direct measurement of heart rate variability.  

When we breathe so that the length of our inhale matches our heart rate increase and our exhale matches our heart rate decrease, we maximize RSA. Typically, this occurs when breathing at around 6 breaths per minute. This coherence among breathing and heart rate maximizes heart rate variability and improves cardiovascular efficiency.

 

2. Breathing and Chemoreflexes

They reviewed a study conducted with yoga trainees and non-yoga trained participants. This study assessed how different breathing protocols affect sensitivity to high carbon dioxide (hypercapnia) and low oxygen (hypoxia). These sensitivities are known as chemoreflexes.

As we might expect, the chemoreflexes of the yoga practitioners at baseline were much lower than the non-trained participants. This means their breathing did not increase as much when exposed to hypercapnia or hypoxia.

Interestingly, when breathing at 6 breaths per minute, the controls' chemoreflexes decreased to levels similar to the yogis.  Therefore, the simple act of slow breathing reduced chemosensitivity to carbon dioxide and hypoxia, regardless of previous training.

Being able to tolerate changes to carbon dioxide and oxygen easily is a sign of respiratory and physical resiliency. And merely slowing down your breathing can improve this resiliency almost immediately.

 

How Will Your Next Meeting Go?

Breathing is fascinating because it’s both autonomic and under our control. Obviously, we can’t control every breath we take, and I think that would be an awful way to live.  But, we can deliberately set aside time to harness what we’ve learned from this study.  

Just a few minutes of slow breathing at around 6 breaths per minute can improve chemosensitivity and align your cardiovascular and respiratory systems.  This will help make the other 25,000 odd breaths you take that much more effective.

Here’s to being the regulator of our health and well-being.

In good breath,
Nick

P.S. I would be the first one captured.

 

James Nestor Q&A

James Nestor is holding a “Breathing Q&A,” where he is rounding up questions related to all aspects of breathing to sending them to be answered by experts in the field of respiratory science. I have a few to submit…you should too!

Learn More Here.

Yoga & Breathing Virtual Workshop

My wife is teaching a masterclass on breathing and yoga as part of a larger Virtual Yoga Festival. She’s mixing in slow breathing, CO2 tolerance, Oxygen Advantage, and The Art of Breath. I don’t “advertise” in my newsletter, but the studio hosting the event is donating all of the profits to No Kid Hungry. So if you’re into yoga and/or breathing, you can learn and support a good cause at the same time.

Learn More Here.



 

Heart Rate Variability, Stress Response, and PTSD

low_vagal_tone_may_account.png

In post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), physiological arousal is increased when a person is reminded of their traumatic experience.  This is somewhat unsurprising. 

An over activated sympathetic nervous system almost certainly plays a role in this. However, under activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, or “low vagal tone,” might be equally important. 

The goal of the paper I’m sharing this week was to examine these two components and determine which might be responsible for the enhanced stress response in PTSD.

As with most things, the answer is likely “they both matter.” But here is what they found.

Low Heart Rate Variability Linked to Enhanced Stress Response

(Read the Full Summary Here)

They measured high-frequency heart rate variability (HRV) as a marker of parasympathetic tone. Then, the participants were read a trauma script and their physiological response was recorded.

Results showed that patients with a higher baseline HRV did not experience as much stress.  The subjects with lower HRV showed a higher heart rate peak, followed by a slower deceleration of heart rate.  That is, they showed an elevated stress response.

The patients with lower baseline HRV also had longer half-recovery times, meaning that their stress response was not only elevated, but also prolonged. 

These findings suggest that low parasympathetic tone, rather than just increased sympathetic activity, might help explain the increased physiological stress response in PTSD.

Two Takeaways

  1. HRV measurements might provide insight into the severity of a person’s PTSD and predict how well they respond to stress.

  2. Slow breathing is one of the easiest ways to improve HRV, both immediately and long term.

If HRV predicts the stress response, and HRV can be increased via breathing exercises, it is conceivable that breathing practices could improve stress resiliency in PTSD.  (In fact, a 2013 study found that a yoga breathing program significantly improves PTSD symptoms in Australian Vietnam veterans.)

Finally (and importantly), these takeaways might be applicable to conditions other than PTSD, such as anxiety disorder, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.

In good breath,
Nick