Listen Instead of Reading
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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…
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
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.””
1 Answer
Category: Airway Anatomy
Answer: The roof of the mouth can equally be called the floor of this.
…
(Cue the Jeopardy! music.)
…
Question: What is the nasal cavity?
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.
