Breathing Exercises For Beginners - James Nestor

there are so many different configurations of this breathing but they all do generally the same thing [Music] i have my theories but the nose provides what secondary tertiary benefits for bringing in a breath through your nose if you breathe the breath through your mouth right now how hard is that to do it's not hard at all all of that air goes directly into your lungs if you breathe the breath through your nose a lot more resistance okay and because there is more resistance that air is pressurized and it is cleaned and filtered so this is our first line of defense okay against pollution against viruses against bacteria against mold it's our noses so not only do they pressurize that air and help filter it but our noses release a huge profusion of nitric oxide which battles viruses okay helps kill viruses and bacteria and you've got a population about 25 to 50 percent i've seen numbers higher than that a little lower but it's a lot of us are habitual mouth breathers at night that percentage goes up to more than 60 percent of us breathe through our mouths at night so one of the things you talk about in the book is how to potentially prevent breathing through your mouth at night um and that's to tape your mouth all right could you speak to that one second yeah i'm so scared this is gonna be on my gravestone uh when i die this this is my contribution to to humanity but uh i would love to take credit for it it wasn't my discovery i heard about this from a breathing therapist at stanford then i heard about it from so many other dentists and people have been doing this for literally decades so there is a problem with breathing through your mouth at night you tend to stress yourself out it's very inefficient you expose your lungs we already mentioned that it makes you much more apt to snore it can even make you more apt to suffer from sleep apnea and so what do you do about that you're unconscious you can't consciously shut your mouth shut so a hundred years ago there's advertisements for chin straps people used to wear these to keep their mouths shut not too into that so i learned about sleep tape which i don't have i found a little piece of uh of painters tape here but this is the technology of sleep tape everybody you put a piece of tape about this size on your lips and that's it this should not be a hermetic seal this isn't a hostage situation it's a reminder to keep your mouth shut and i cannot tell this is the one thing i've heard more from people than than anything else is how wearing a teeny piece of free tape has transformed their sleep because they're tracking their sleep and for a lot of people it's either reduced their snoring or eliminated it entirely amazing so it's a it's almost a subconscious uh physical reminder while you're unconscious it is and just a warning to everyone if you try to go and do it tonight it's going to be miserable you're going to hate it that misery is going to last for a couple weeks if you want to get into closing your mouth at night wear this little piece of tape for a half an hour a day while answering emails or doing doing dishes some mundane tasks increase the time in the daytime get used to it get comfortable then move into doing it at night so uh you know my own experience is it was comfortable at night doing it i i actually didn't realize was such a small piece so i went through the hermetically sealed duct tape on my mouth but it still worked fine uh and so i'll try the small piece uh as a as a new experiment different strokes for different i i'll just say sometimes people really like the big fat strip of tape that's cool i'm not here to pass judgment whatever works for you works for you what i am going to say is breathe your nose and especially breathe through your nose at night while you're sleeping and track it and you'll there's a very good chance you'll see your sleep quality significantly improve amazing so everybody watching if you do nothing else uh please realize the the criticality we spend a third of our life sleeping or we should if we're looking to be healthy and uh and making sure that's a high quality sleep let's talk about breathing rate so you know on my aura app which i measure my my sleep with i gives you your your breathing rate and it's pretty at night solid at 15 breaths per minute i'm curious have you been able to reduce your your breathing rate at night from many practices versus the conscious breathing rate during the day when you practice slower breathing techniques and when you become very picky about how you're breathing in the day that bleeds into how you breathe at night we know this because breathing practices these slow and easy practices have been shown to be very effective for people with sleep apnea whether or not they use sleep tape you said well how can that be imagine breathing really heavy right now how easy is it to cause that vibration in the back of the throat now breathe very very slowly and softly through your nose try to snore when you're breathing that way it's almost impossible so luckily there's a study booting up with a researcher at harvard your year old alma mater who is looking at using these breathing techniques and then measuring what happens with people with sleep apnea how they reduce their symptoms or or help alleviate it for some some forms of sleep apnea so let's go into the breathing rate a little more deeply again our sort of default breathing rate at 15 breaths per minute uh your advice at getting down to 10 or as low as six and there's various breathing techniques and i want to go into that in a couple of minutes where you take us through some exercises for my own benefit but uh for everybody here um making this conscious in your life is uh is one of the most important things because you can breathe more shallow you can breathe less frequently but it requires a conscious shift at least early on any advice on that it's a habit and once you've had a bad habit for decades and decades switching over to a better habit takes a long time we're very impatient people in this modern world we want things to happen in a day it's not going to happen in a day for some people it can happen after a few weeks for some people it can happen after a few months luckily we're breathing all the time you're breathing while you're answering email while you're working while you're walking around so you can take those times to start focusing on your breath a little more i'm not saying you have to carry around a notepad or whatever but you can use maybe set little timers on your phone every hour just check in just one little bell goes out how am i breathing what's my rate how deeply am i breathing am i breathing in a calm way and i don't want to give a prescription on how people should do this because there's a zillion ways and everyone's different on what they're really going to attach to and identify with but i will tell you that the science is very clear by controlling your breathing by adopting these healthy habits it is going to have a positive effect on your health period i i know this to be true sort of uh intellectually and just in my in my soul um and i think of you uh at least a couple times a day james as i as i reflect on my breathing uh and so uh let's you know a friend of mine will henshaw who's one of our abundance 360 members uh he runs a company called focus at will he had had a life-changing event where he had uh a heart attack and died and then came back and he just remembers and pays reverence to that breath as the fundamental part of life you know just just i remember him telling the story in such a compelling fashion that you know breath equals life in that regard um please i was just gonna say there there's been so much focus on healthy eating and of course what you eat is gonna impact your health there's no doubt about it but how do we get most of our energy most of it comes from air it comes from oxygen so how you take that air in and how you exhale it of course it's going to make a difference to your energy levels to your general health and operating more efficiently is going to give you more energy to repair and to restore which is what almost all of us need right now living in the modern world so we're going to go to questions from the abundance community and from uh social stream in a moment but uh if you don't mind take us through some of the fundamental breathing techniques that you speak about in the book that is a gift to the community here to take away uh from from today these are going to seem so completely simple and basic that a lot of people aren't going to think they're they're going to do much but uh just because something is simple doesn't mean it's not powerful so a great one that i learned from dr andrew huberman at stanford who's been studying breathing for the past couple of years is whenever you're at that moment where you feel anxious you feel a little tension you need to reset right so what's a way of resetting for some people that's going sitting in the dark and meditating for 20 minutes that's great that works but sometimes we're in an airport or we're at a conference we're about to speak and we need that little reset take two inhales one on top of the other hoover man calls this a physiological side so it looks like this [Music] and then very calmly let it flow out so that's two big inhales do that about three or four times and then go into a slow breathing about five to six seconds in five to six seconds out do this for as long as you want a minute or two and i think you'll feel something amazing happening in your brain and in your body it's you're entering a state of calm you're resetting that panic feedback loop that anxiety and you're telling your body it's time to start over again and start in a calmer way i feel i feel it already just from trying it twice you can look at your heart rate for for skeptics out there say oh it's a placebo effect do your own measurements look at your heart rate variability right look at your blood pressure before i actually did the experiment with uh with my blood pressure cuff of uh and i was able to reduce my blood pressure my my systolic by like 10 points it was incredible yeah you don't hear about that in in your doctor's office never heard about it i went through four years of medical school never heard a damn thing about breathing yeah well my father-in-law is a pulmonologist he's been a pull analysis for 40 50 years and he hadn't heard 85 percent of the stuff that that i found in the book so there you go okay so that's that is in a situation of anxiety you want to reset sort of like your your physiology uh i i i get that uh what's another one i think a good one and and andrew wilde made this very famous 478 breathing this is when you really want to come down so i would not do this before you're going for an interview and you need a reset this is when you want to go to sleep you're on a plane you want to go to sleep you're amped up you had a very busy day and all it is is inhale to a count of four hold for seven exhale for eight so of course we're gonna do this everybody ready here we go inhale one two three four hold seven two three four five six seven excel eight two three four five six seven eight etcetera etcetera quick math that will take you down to four breaths per minute roughly about four breaths per minute and a lot of people use box breathing i'm just gonna slip this one in there while we're talking about this box breathing is four four four so inhale to four hold for four exhale to four hold for four what do both of those breathing patterns have in common well for about 75 percent of it you are either holding your breath or you are exhaling when you hold your breath when you exhale your heart rate goes down you calm down so there are so many different configurations of this breathing but they all do generally the same thing and you can use these anytime anywhere that 478 i find is pretty powerful stuff so i'll use it before going to bed and i'll stick with the physiological sigh if i'm out and about in the world hey if you like this video please give it a thumbs up it helps get the word out and if you love the content that i talk about present about please subscribe to this channel and one more thing don't forget please give me your comments down below i love seeing what you think about all of this we put a lot of time into it with incredible people and would love to have your feedback [Music] you

Channel: Peter H. Diamandis

Views: 38,195

Keywords: peter diamandis, longevity, xprize, abundance, breathing exercises, science of breathing, breathing, breath book, james nestor breath, james nestor, power of breathing, power of breathing meditation, breathing help, slow breathing, breath work, Breathing exercises for beginners, breathwork for anxiety, breath work for sleep, breath work guide

Id: itlRu-nTd9s

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 10 2022