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Reading Time: 1 min 27 sec

I hope the next 22’ish breaths are the most nourishing of your day.

4 THOUGHTS

1. 24 One-Sentence Breathing Ideas for 2024

1. Breathing saves your life 20,000 times a day; mindfulness helps you appreciate this truth.

2. Breathing is 90% mental; the other half is physical.

3. The best healing breathing exercise is laughter.

Read all 24 thoughts here.

P.S. We’ve made it four years straight with this one-sentence idea. Here’s to many more 🙏

2. My Favorite Books of 2023

I read 50 books last year. I’ve made a list of all of them and also broke them into the following categories:

My Top 3 Overall
My Top 3 on Breathing
My Top 3 on Mindfulness
My Top 3 on Mindset

Read the lists here.

3. An Incredible Passage on the Power of Breathing to Start 2024

“If you breathe in calmly and hold your breath for a while before exhaling slowly, you will stimulate your vagus nerve, which in turn will have a soothing effect on your body and brain. That is why training in meditation breathing is a formidable tool for controlling and consciously inhibiting unconscious stress reactions. As such, it allows us to modify our brain activity (as we have demonstrated in our lab) to overcome anxiety, to lower blood pressure and sugar levels (and thus reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases), to strengthen the immune and metabolic systems, and to have a positive influence on numerous pathologies.”

- Steven Laureys, MD, The No-Nonsense Meditation Book

4. The Secret Ingredient to Healing (from a 102-year-old doctor)

“Healing, too, takes its own time. More often than not, time is the secret ingredient that allows healing to take place. Sometimes, while we're wishing things would hurry up, they're doing exactly what they should be doing.”
– Gladys McGarey, MD (102), The Well-Lived Life

Thats an excellent reminder that with healing, time is our ally, not enemy 🙏

1 Quote

“It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.””

— Francis of Assisi

1 Answer

Category: Funny Breathing

Answer: The number one reason we do this breathing exercise is not because of jokes but actually to bond with others.

…

(Cue the Jeopardy! music.)

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Question: What is laugh?

In good breath,

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

P.S. a gummy vitamin perhaps

Coaching

Breathing & Mindfulness 1-on-1

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Amazon Associate Disclosure

I’ve been recommending books for almost 6 years. Yet somehow, I just discovered that I could be an Amazon affiliate [face-palm]. In any case better late than never. Now, any Amazon link you click is an affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. So, if you’d like to support my work, buying books through these links is helpful : )

* 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.

🎧 Listen Instead of Reading 🎧

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. A First Goal of Pranayama is This

“Hence, through pranayama, one attempts to do away with the effort of respiration; rhythmic breathing must become something so automatic that the yogin can forget it.”
- Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom

An excellent reminder that we train our breathing, consistently and deliberately, so we can forget about it. Effort leads to effortlessness. Ancient yogis agree.

2. Slow Breathing Offers “Promising Prospects in Chronic Diseases Management”

A 2021 review of heart rate variability biofeedback (HRVB; aka slow breathing) for chronic illness examined 29 studies with over 1100 patients, concluding:

“Given the reported positive effects of HRVB on psychophysiological outcomes in various patient profiles, it is clear that HRVB offers promising prospects in chronic diseases management.”
- Heart rate variability biofeedback in chronic disease management: A systematic review

It looks like, once again, I’m not as crazy as I sometimes feel with this breathing stuff (and neither were those slow, rhythmic-breathing ancient yogis 😁).

***

P.S. A quick rant on HRVB vs. slow breathing for the nerds like me 🤓

3. How to Be Warm-Hearted: Slow Breathing and The 4 Elements of Compassion

In one of my new favorite books, Biofeedback and Mindfulness in Everyday Life, Dr. Inna Khazan tells us that compassion requires 4 physiological elements:

“Ability to orient and bring attention toward the person in need.
Ability to engage socially with others in times of stress.
Ability to feel safe while engaging with others.
Ability to regulate our own physiology.”

Critically, these traits tie back to our hearts, specifically HRV:

“What all four of these points tell us is that HRV is central to the physiological foundations of compassion and self-compassion.”

And, most critically, HRV can be quickly and sustainably increased with slow breathing, helping you become more compassionate:

“doing the structured, straightforward, and easily accessible HRV training will help you in developing and nurturing your ability to express and act with compassion toward others and self-compassion for yourself.”

Sounds good to me : )

4. Remember this Emotional Toil for 2022

“As far as I can tell, the only thing more difficult than the emotional toil of pursuing true excellence is the emotional toil of not pursuing true excellence.”
- Steven Kotler, The Art of Impossible

Breathing certainly isn’t everything. But, it is the starting point for pursuing true excellence in all aspects of our lives. And we wouldn’t want to live with the emotional toil of not doing that : )

Bonus Thought: My Favorite Books of 2021

“We read books to find out who we are.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin

I read 56 books this year, a new record for me. Here’s a list of them, plus my Top 3 for: Overall, Breathing, and Better Living/Philosophy.

I hope the nuggets of wisdom I have shared from some of these have helped your 2021 be better in some way 🙏

1 QUOTE

“We are all journeying through the night with plans, breathing in and out this mysterious life.”
– Tara Brach

1 ANSWER

Category: The Airways

Answer: These are the narrowest passageways air goes through before reaching the alveoli.

…

(Cue the Jeopardy! music.)

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Question: What are bronchioles?