breath-heart connection

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

 
 

🎧 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. 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.

 
 

Breath & Heart: 14 Loving Quotes on the Heart-Breath 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

 

4. “Recitation of the rosary, and also of yoga mantras, slowed respiration to almost exactly 6/min, and enhanced heart rate variability”

- Bernardi et al. 2001*

 

5. “when you inhale, your heart rate (the number of times your heart beats per minute) naturally rises; when you exhale, it slows down again. This is true for everyone.”

- Leah Lagos

 

6. “Exhales slow the heart rate; the longer we spend on the outbreath, the more the nervous systems relaxes.”

- Emma Seppälä

 

7. “Your respiratory and cardiovascular systems are designed to work in synchrony. […] Your breathing acts as a stimulus for the heart. In physics, this kind of relationship between your breathing and your heart rate is called resonance, a property of a system where two oscillating components interplay with each other, producing increases in oscillation amplitude.”

- Inna Khazan

 

8. “These waves seem to oscillate around 0.1 Hertz. When we inhale and exhale at that rate, our respiration has the potential to optimize the rhythm of various mechanisms and align them with our heart rate. ‘When you breathe at that same rate, it’s like pushing the swing at the perfect moment,’ Noble says.”

- Timothy Meinch

 

9. “If you found that your heart beats faster when you breathe in than when you breathe out, you are correct.  You have discovered that every breath you take affects your heart rate.”

– Drs Patricia Gerbarg and Richard Brown

 

10. “These practices demonstrate that the mind and the heart follow the lungs, not the other way around.”

- Michael J. Stephenson

 

11. “The heart itself rests on the dome of the diaphragm […] Each time the diaphragm moves, it tugs on the heart.  Imagine a game of balloon toss, with the heart gently bounced on this elastic trampoline, rocked with each breath, approximately 20,000 times a day.”

- Robin Rothenberg

 

12. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart, which is, of course, my diaphragm.”

- Jill Miller

 

13. “Slowing the breath down activates the prefrontal cortex and increases heart rate variability, which helps shift the brain and body from a state of stress to self-control mode. A few minutes of this technique will make you feel calm, in control, and capable of handling cravings or challenges.”

- Kelly McGonigal

 

14. “There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted. Then there’s another way; a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity.”

- Rumi

Footnote:

Reference for #4: Bernardi L, Sleight P, Bandinelli G, Cencetti S, Fattorini L, Wdowczyc-Szulc J, Lagi A. Effect of rosary prayer and yoga mantras on autonomic cardiovascular rhythms: comparative study. BMJ. 2001 Dec 22-29;323(7327):1446-9. doi: 10.1136/bmj.323.7327.1446. PMID: 11751348; PMCID: PMC61046.