loving potential

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My New Favorite Therapy, Self Love, and Your Breathing Headphones

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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. Reading Can Produce Healing (my new favorite word & therapy)

“Bibliotherapy is based on the assumption that the simple act of reading can produce healing of various health conditions, including depression. The definition of bibliotherapy has broadened over the years to include using any type of reading material that is uplifting or emotionally sustaining.”

 - Herbert Benson, MD, Relaxation Revolution

 

As someone obsessed with reading, bibliotherapy might be my new favorite word and therapy : ) However, I’ve always thought that reading alone is not enough; we must also act. 

Maybe I’m wrong…

As Dr. Benson says, one study found “Therapeutic reading ranked toward the top of the interventions, along with CBT and supportive-expressive groups, as a highly effective method of decreasing depressive symptoms.” <— 🤯

I hope these 411s serve as bibliotherapy for you 🙏

2. The Relaxation Response for Stress-Related Diseases

“Taken together, the RR has been shown to be an appropriate and relevant therapeutic tool to counteract several stress-related disease processes and certain health restrictions, particularly in immunological, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative diseases/mental disorders.”

- Esch et al. (2003)

This study found that regularly eliciting the relaxation response can counter the adverse effects of stress and serve as a free therapeutic tool in many chronic diseases, especially immunological, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative/mental disorders.

Want to use it in your life? Here’s a short video showing you how.

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P.S. If you want to use the relaxation response to conquer stress, check out the latest Science 411 on this paper or the new Book 411 on Relaxation Revolution, released this past Friday.

3. Breathing as Spiritual Headphones

Breathing exercises are like spiritual headphones: You can tune in, not bother anyone, and no one will ever know what you’re “listening” to.

4. Breathing is Self-Love, a Pre-Requisite for Loving Others

Last week, we learned that high vagal tone = high loving potential; thus, slow breathing increases our loving potential.

But the key word there is “potential:”

“While these activities do not directly create positivity resonance, they can set the table for an eventual feast of love. … They condition your mind, heart, eyes, and ears to be more prepared for positivity resonance when true connections become possible.”

- Barbara Fredrickson, Ph.D., Love 2.0

So, we might say that a daily breathing practice is self-love, which prepares your heart and mind to love others.

1 Quote

“We must meet hate with love. We must meet physical force with soul force.””
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

1 Answer

Category: Stress

Answer: When free radical production exceeds antioxidant defenses, it creates this kind of stress.

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(Cue the Jeopardy! music.)

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Question: What is oxidative stress?

P.S. The relaxation response helps counter this stress, too.

In good breath,

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


P.S. I’ve been really missing my friends

* 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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More Loving Potential, Cold Showers, and the Healing Power of Mind

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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. How to Improve Your Loving Potential

“High vagal tone, then, can be taken as high loving potential. … Compared to people with lower vagal tone, those with higher vagal tone experience more love in their daily lives, more moments of positivity resonance.”

- Barbara Fredrickson, Love 2.0

High vagal tone = high loving potential. That’s pretty awesome.

And fortunately, we can immediately increase our vagal tone with just a few minutes of slow breathing. We can also improve our baseline vagal tone with just 10-20 minutes of slow breathing every day.

So breathe less, love more.

2. Do Cold Showers Improve Breathing Efficiency? (my guess is yes)

“It’s very simple. A cold shower a day keeps the doctor away.”

- Wim Hof, The Wim Hof Method

Wim also tells us that when we practice cold exposure, we exercise our “sixty-two thousand miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries,” ultimately improving blood flow.

This matters because we need adequate blood flow to get oxygen and nutrients to the cells. Thus, better blood flow = better breathing.

So, in addition to keeping the doctor away, we might guess that a cold shower a day keeps us breathing in an efficient way…

Learn more cold benefits in the Book 411 and Science 411s available as part of the Wim Hof Wisdom Bundle.

3. One Reason (of many) We Began Habitually Mouth Breathing

There are lots of reasons why mouth breathing is so prevalent, but this is one I hadn’t heard that makes a lot of sense:

“Of course it's often tough to avoid mouth breathing, especially since we started living much of our lives indoors. … Enclosed spaces are areas where allergens (substances that cause allergies) tend to concentrate. … In turn these allergy-friendly environments increased the odds that children would early on develop upper respiratory problems.”

- Sandra Kahn & Paul Erhlich, Jaws

4. A Small Thought on Adding Meaning

Your birthday, January 1st, or any holiday are all just ordinary days.

What makes them so fun is that we add meaning to them.

And what’s amazing is that we can use this power of meaning anytime we want.

We can make an ordinary breath practice extraordinary by adding meaning to it.

We can make anything extraordinary by adding meaning to it.

Being with Diabetes: Meditation as Medicine

Just a quick reminder from last week. The Diabetes Sangha’s Being with Diabetes course starts January 15th.

I hope you’ll check it out if you have diabetes or live/work with people that do 🙏

Here’s the 20% discount code they graciously offered 411 readers/listeners:

Discount Code: BREATHE-20

Click Here to Learn More

1 Quote

“Gradually, study after mind body study, carried out with the most careful scientific protocols, produced incontrovertible evidence that the mind can indeed influence—and heal—the body.””
— Herbert Benson, MD

1 Answer

Category: Airway Anatomy

Answer: The roof of the mouth can equally be called the floor of this.

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(Cue the Jeopardy! music.)

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Question: What is the nasal cavity?

In good breath,

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


P.S. New Year’s resolution off to a good start

* 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.