🎧 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
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.)
…
In good breath,
Nick Heath, T1D, PhD
“Breathing is the compound interest of health & wellness.”
* 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.
