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I hope the next 22’ish breaths are the most nourishing of your day.
4 THOUGHTS
1. The Entire Purpose of the Human Brain
“The entire purpose of the human brain is to produce movement. Movement is the only way we have of interacting with the world.”
– Daniel Wolpert, Ph.D., from The Joy of Movement
And the most fundamental movement the brain produces to interact with the world? The movement of air—our breathing 😊
2. Five Minutes for Meaningful Change
“The lack of significant association between effectiveness and session durations >= 5 min indicates that any session duration beyond 5 min can be effective…simply engaging in a breathing practice provides benefits, with sessions as short as 5 min yielding comparable benefits to longer sessions.”
This was the most surprising yet welcome result of this excellent paper: We only need five minutes of slow breathing practice to see significant improvements in stress and anxiety.
Of course, longer sessions can have different benefits. But if our goal is lowering stress (or we’re short on time), we can be pretty confident that even five minutes will make a meaningful difference in our day 🙏
3. It Isn’t Really a Wonder
“There are quite a few validated, scientific findings that suggest that controlled breathing has a wide range of beneficial effects…This makes a lot of sense…it isn’t really a wonder that the thing that keeps us alive also impacts how we experience life.”
- Eddie Stern, Healing Through Breathing
“It isn’t really a wonder that the thing that keeps us alive also impacts how we experience life.” That’s so good, so obvious, and so logical, which is why it’s so easy to overlook 👏
4. A House a Home, a Cup a Drink
Like how the space inside a house makes it a home, or the emptiness within a cup makes it useful for drinking, it is the breath inside the body that makes it so remarkable for living.
1 Quote
“Your mind cannot heal without laughter.””
1 Answer
Category: The Best Breathing Exercise
Answer: Children do this about 300-400 times a day while adults only do it about 15 times a day.
…
(Cue the Jeopardy! music.)
…
Question: What is laugh?
In good breath,
Nick Heath, T1D, PhD
“Breathing is the compound interest of health & wellness.”
P.S. three day recovery period
Breath Science & Wisdom Meditations for a Well-Lived Life
Learn to think, speak, and act in alignment with the person you want to be.
The Breathing App for Diabetes
This is the first program specifically made for people with diabetes to help manage their stress through breathing and mindfulness practices. In addition to the amazing program inside the app, we have some really neat things coming up, so sign up now!
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.