Welcome to another edition of The Breathing 4.1.1. Below, you’ll find 4 thoughts, 1 quote, and 1 answer (like "Jeopardy") related to breathing. Let’s jump right in.
4 THOUGHTS
1. The Best Way to Invest in Your Health
Investing in your breathing is like putting your money in an S&P 500 index fund.
You’re investing a little bit into your body's many essential functions, including your respiration, autonomic nervous system, cardiovascular system, metabolism, and brain.
Suppose you picked only one of these areas to focus all of your attention on. If you got really lucky, it could make a massive difference in your life (like getting lucky with one stock). But with breathing, like with an index fund, you add a little to each bucket. Together, these gains add up to meaningful health benefits.
But unlike the stock market, there are no speculators, and there is no gambling. You just have to show up each day, add a little to your health fund, and enjoy the compounding over time.
2. A Never-Ending Cleanse?
"The waste that is collected by the blood and delivered to the lungs is expelled with the next inhale, but few people realize that 70 percent of the waste that our bodies generate is removed by the breath. Only 30 percent is removed via sweat and elimination."
- Al Lee and Don Campbell, Perfect Breathing
At first glance, that’s a pretty crazy statistic. But, it makes a lot of sense.
Those other ways of removing toxins (sweating, restroom breaks) only occur several times a day (or maybe not at all for sweating). We typically breathe 20,000+ times a day and upwards of 3000 gallons of air.
So, perhaps it is not surprising that our bodies use the breath to eliminate toxins. And maybe what’s more surprising is that optimizing breathing isn’t the first step of any "cleanse."
3. The Best (and Second Best) Time to Start a Breathing Practice
"Build before you have to.
- Build knowledge before you have to.
- Build strength before you have to.
- Build an emergency fund before you have to.Let internal pressure drive you today, so you can handle external pressure tomorrow."
James Clear, 3-2-1 Newsletter (3 Sep 2020)
This excellent idea reminded me of the ancient Chinese proverb that begins: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. If you want a tree now, you need to have planted it 20 years ago. If you need strength now, you need to have been building it previously.
The Chinese proverb, however, ends like this: The second best time is now.
With COVID-19 shining light on the importance of a healthy respiratory system, we all realized how critical a breathing practice is. With that in mind, I’d like to play off of that idea:
The best time to start a breathing practice was 12 months ago.
The second best time is now.
4. How Breathing Impacts Urination during Sleep
"But if the body has inadequate time in deep sleep, as it does when it experiences chronic sleep apnea, vasopressin won’t be secreted normally. The kidneys will release water, which triggers the need to urinate and signals to our brains that we should consume more liquid. We get thirsty, and we need to pee more."
- James Nestor, Breath, pg. 30
When people switch to nose breathing at night, they commonly notice they need to get up to pee less. Here, James explains why.
Vasopressin "communicates with cells to store more water," he tells us. When you get inadequate deep sleep, this communication is disrupted.
Nose breathing at night, as we know, reduces obstructive sleep apnea, leading to deeper sleep. This helps explain why we wake up less when we switch to nose breathing at night.
(Thanks to 411 reader J. M. for inspiring this thought!)
1 QUOTE
“One day I noticed that I wasn’t breathing—I was being breathed.”
– Byron Katie
1 ANSWER
Answer: The number of scents the human nose can smell.
…
(Cue the Jeopardy music.)
…
Question: What is 1 trillion?
In good breath,
Nick