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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.)

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Question: What is respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)?

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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

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* 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.

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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.

Two Regulatory Effects of Breathing (+ James Nestor Breathing Q&A)

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” - Marcus Aurelius

You probably hate Zoom meetings by now. In fact, if you work in an office setting, you’re probably just tired of meetings in general. But every now and then, you have a truly important meeting. You prepare, rehearse, read, dress nice, and do everything you can to show up ready. 

Physiologically, we step into one of these “truly important meetings” approximately 25,000 times per day…no big deal, I know :) And we can choose how well we prepare for each one. We can send messages of calm, focus, and relaxation, or messages of anxiety, stress, and arousal.  

Whichever we choose, the messages we send with our breathing regulate many aspects of our health and well-being.  

How? Well, the answer to that is complex because breathing interacts with many systems of the body simultaneously (as we learned last week). But, the paper I am sharing this week goes through two significant regulatory effects of breathing.

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Modulatory Effects of Respiration

Published in Autonomic Neuroscience: Basic and Clinical (2001)

Click Here to Read the Full Summary

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The two main takeaways from this study are:

(1) Breathing modulates the cardiovascular system through respiratory sinus arrhythmia  

(2) Specific breathing patterns can reduce our chemosensitivity to carbon dioxide and hypoxia

1. Breathing and the Cardiovascular System

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) measures how breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure all interact. Put simply, RSA is the increase in your heart rate as you inhale and the decrease in your heart rate as you exhale. RSA is thought to be an index of vagal activity and direct measurement of heart rate variability.  

When we breathe so that the length of our inhale matches our heart rate increase and our exhale matches our heart rate decrease, we maximize RSA. Typically, this occurs when breathing at around 6 breaths per minute. This coherence among breathing and heart rate maximizes heart rate variability and improves cardiovascular efficiency.

2. Breathing and Chemoreflexes

They reviewed a study conducted with yoga trainees and non-yoga trained participants. This study assessed how different breathing protocols affect sensitivity to high carbon dioxide (hypercapnia) and low oxygen (hypoxia). These sensitivities are known as chemoreflexes.

As we might expect, the chemoreflexes of the yoga practitioners at baseline were much lower than the non-trained participants. This means their breathing did not increase as much when exposed to hypercapnia or hypoxia.

Interestingly, when breathing at 6 breaths per minute, the controls' chemoreflexes decreased to levels similar to the yogis.  Therefore, the simple act of slow breathing reduced chemosensitivity to carbon dioxide and hypoxia, regardless of previous training.

Being able to tolerate changes to carbon dioxide and oxygen easily is a sign of respiratory and physical resiliency. And merely slowing down your breathing can improve this resiliency almost immediately.

How Will Your Next Meeting Go?

Breathing is fascinating because it’s both autonomic and under our control. Obviously, we can’t control every breath we take, and I think that would be an awful way to live.  But, we can deliberately set aside time to harness what we’ve learned from this study.  

Just a few minutes of slow breathing at around 6 breaths per minute can improve chemosensitivity and align your cardiovascular and respiratory systems.  This will help make the other 25,000 odd breaths you take that much more effective.

Here’s to being the regulator of our health and well-being.

In good breath,
Nick

P.S. I would be the first one captured.

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James Nestor Q&A

James Nestor is holding a “Breathing Q&A,” where he is rounding up questions related to all aspects of breathing to sending them to be answered by experts in the field of respiratory science. I have a few to submit…you should too!

Learn More Here.

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Yoga & Breathing Virtual Workshop

My wife is teaching a masterclass on breathing and yoga as part of a larger Virtual Yoga Festival. She’s mixing in slow breathing, CO2 tolerance, Oxygen Advantage, and The Art of Breath. I don’t “advertise” in my newsletter, but the studio hosting the event is donating all of the profits to No Kid Hungry. So if you’re into yoga and/or breathing, you can learn and support a good cause at the same time.

Learn More Here.

Heart Rate Variability, Stress Response, and PTSD

In post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), physiological arousal is increased when a person is reminded of their traumatic experience.  This is somewhat unsurprising. 

An over activated sympathetic nervous system almost certainly plays a role in this. However, under activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, or “low vagal tone,” might be equally important. 

The goal of the paper I’m sharing this week was to examine these two components and determine which might be responsible for the enhanced stress response in PTSD.

As with most things, the answer is likely “they both matter.” But here is what they found.

Low Heart Rate Variability Linked to Enhanced Stress Response

(Read the Full Summary Here)

They measured high-frequency heart rate variability (HRV) as a marker of parasympathetic tone. Then, the participants were read a trauma script and their physiological response was recorded.

Results showed that patients with a higher baseline HRV did not experience as much stress.  The subjects with lower HRV showed a higher heart rate peak, followed by a slower deceleration of heart rate.  That is, they showed an elevated stress response.

The patients with lower baseline HRV also had longer half-recovery times, meaning that their stress response was not only elevated, but also prolonged. 

These findings suggest that low parasympathetic tone, rather than just increased sympathetic activity, might help explain the increased physiological stress response in PTSD.

Two Takeaways

1. HRV measurements might provide insight into the severity of a person’s PTSD and predict how well they respond to stress.

2. Slow breathing is one of the easiest ways to improve HRV, both immediately and long term.

If HRV predicts the stress response, and HRV can be increased via breathing exercises, it is conceivable that breathing practices could improve stress resiliency in PTSD.  (In fact, a 2013 study found that a yoga breathing program significantly improves PTSD symptoms in Australian Vietnam veterans.)

Finally (and importantly), these takeaways might be applicable to conditions other than PTSD, such as anxiety disorder, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.

In good breath,
Nick

How slow breathing improves emotional well-being (hint: it might be in your nose)

Hi everyone,

I hope you’re having a great weekend.

Let’s continue on our theme of slow breathing and enhanced well-being. If you missed/forgot last week’s post, check it out here.

The paper I’m sharing this week might win best title award (well, at least the part before the colon):

How breath-control can change your life: A systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing

(Click Here to read full summary)

That’s pretty awesome for a peer-reviewed journal article.

This paper examined a wide range of studies to understand how physiological changes associated with slow breathing correlated with improved emotional outcomes.

Here are the common results they found throughout the literature:

• Slow breathing increases heart rate variability

• Slow breathing increases respiratory sinus arrhythmia

• Slow breathing increases alpha brain wave activity

These benefits were correlated with improvements in stress, anxiety, depression, and well-being.

Thus, breathing changes your physiology, and your physiology changes your emotions.

And to me, that wasn’t the best part. This was.

The authors hypothesize that the nose provides the link between slow breathing, brain and autonomic functioning, and positive emotional outcomes. It’s not just slow breathing, it’s nose breathing. Breathing slowly through the mouth would not improve stress and anxiety.

From a practical perspective, all of the studies used breathing rates of 3-6 breaths/min. With practice, we can use an app (such as Breathing Zone) to achieve these slow rates.

However, let’s not rely purely on the science. Try practicing slow breathing at 6 breaths/min for 5 min/day to see the results for yourself. They might turn out to be the most important 5 minutes of your day.

In good breath,
Nick

P.S. Lean into stress.