How to Breathe Correctly for Optimal Health, Mood, Learning & Performance

Normal healthy breathing is breathing about 6 liters of air per minute ... 6 liters of air per minute is about 12 shallowish breaths ... Most people breathe far too much per minute—that they're engaging in anywhere from 15 to 20 or even 30 shallow breaths per minute.

When people switch to becoming nasal breathers... the aesthetic changes that occur are very dramatic and very favorable, including elevation of the eyebrows... elevation of the cheekbones, sharpening of the jaw, and, most notably, improvements of the teeth and the entire jaw structure.

By changing your pattern of breathing, you can very quickly change what your brain is capable of doing ... While you inhale, you are far better at learning and remembering information than during an exhale—and it is a very significant difference.

It's perfectly normal that one or the other nostril would be harder to breathe through or easier to breathe through and that switches across the day. It has to do with the flow of mucus and cerebrospinal fluid and intracranial pressure. Totally normal.

Because of the fact that there's far less tendency, if any, to snore when nasal breathing... putting medical tape on the mouth prior to going to sleep and then sleeping all night with medical tape on the mouth is one way that people can learn to nasal breathe during sleep and can greatly offset a lot of sleep apnea snoring and sleep-related issues.

One single physiological sigh... performed at any time of day under any conditions... is the fastest physiologically verified way that we are aware of to reduce your levels of stress and to reintroduce calm.

The other thing that breathing through your nose allows you to do is it both warms and moisturizes the air that you bring into your lungs, which is more favorable for lung health than breathing through the mouth.

Breathing is unique among brain and bodily functions in that it lies at the interface between our conscious and our subconscious behavior, and it represents a bridge, literally, in the brain between the conscious and the subconscious.

Breathing in through the nose is a little bit harder, and it's supposed to be a little bit harder. However, because it's a little bit harder, because there's more resistance, as we say, you are actually able to draw more force into these mechanical aspects of the breathing apparatus and actually bring more air into your lungs.

How do you know if you're experiencing sleep apnea? Well, first of all, excessive daytime sleepiness and excessive daytime anxiety combined with daytime sleepiness is one sign that you might be suffering from sleep apnea .. If you happen to snore, it's very likely that you are experiencing sleep apnea. And I should mention that sleep apnea is a very serious health concern. It greatly increases the probability of a cardiovascular event, heart attack, stroke.

Deliberate breathwork practices done for about 5 minutes per day across the course of about a month led to greater reductions in stress than did a 5 minute a day meditation practice.

If you want to increase your heart rate, you can simply inhale longer and more vigorously relative to your exhales. And if you want to decrease your heart rate, well, then you're going to make your exhales longer and/or more vigorous than your inhales.

From the time you get into cold water... I encourage you to try and control your breathing and make it rhythmic. That is inhales follow exhales ... Why? Because the default when we get into a stressful circumstance... is that rhythmic breathing stops.

Diaphragmatic breathing is, in many ways, the ideal way to breathe in that it's the most efficient way to breathe ... If you want to know whether or not you're using diaphragmatic breathing, it's very simple ... If you inhale, and your belly moves outward on the inhale, well, then that phrenic nerve is controlling your diaphragm properly. And then when you exhale, your belly should go in just a little bit.

Breathing is incredible because it represents the interface between conscious and subconscious control ... How you breathe influences your brain state. So, by using your brain consciously to control your breathing, you are using your brain to control your brain.

If you look at any breathing practice.... if you were to measure the ratio of inhales to exhales and the vigor of inhales and exhales, what you would find is that each one would create a net increase or a net decrease in heart rate that could be very accurately predicted by whether or not that breathing practice emphasized inhales, emphasized exhales, or had those two features—inhale and exhale—be of equal duration and intensity.

When you inhale, your reaction time to anything that happens around you... increases significantly compared to when you're exhaling. In addition, when you are inhaling, your ability to remember things, especially things that take a bit of effort to remember, and your ability to learn new information is significantly greater than it is when you're exhaling.

That double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth works to reduce your levels of stress and lower your levels of so-called autonomic arousal very fast in real-time, and it works better than any other known approach. It's not a hack. This is actually something that your body has specific neural circuits to do.

If you have right-side side stitch, the physiological side, done two or three times while still running, ought to to relieve that side stitch.

When you are inhaling air, you're actually less able—or I should say, less efficient—at generating voluntary movements.