USE THIS Breathing Exercise To INSTANTLY IMPROVE Your Health | Dr. Andrew Weil

i mean you have widely popularized the 478 breath um can you tell us what the 478 breath is and you know when did this start coming into your awareness and when did you start talking about it it's a yoga technique so again thousands of years old and uh i learned it from dr fulford and i been practicing it since probably the uh early 1980s and i have taught it i teach it to every patient i come into contact with to all of my students sometimes to very large groups of people it's so time efficient it's just you know the method is simply breathing in quietly through your nose to a count of four holding your breath to account for a count of seven and blowing air out forcibly through your mouth to a count of eight and repeating that for four breath cycles when you're first learning it and doing that twice a day religiously and that's all and by simply doing that uh over time you know over the space of a month or two months you really change the dynamics of the involuntary nervous system uh decrease sympathetic tone increased parasympathetic tone the relaxation response uh lowers heart rate lowers blood pressure improves digestion uh um really amazing results and and it takes 30 seconds twice a day i mean i love recommendations like that you know very very effective but but free and accessible to everybody which i think is something that i always try and keep at the back of my mind when talking about health there's this theme coming up um andrew which is you know i mentioned inflammation before you were becoming aware in the maybe early 80s that there's this kind of root cause of chronic unresolved inflammation that may be behind or at least contributing in a large way to things like hypertension type two diabetes heart disease you know depression whatever it's like okay great you also mentioned that you teach the four seven eight breaths see pretty much every single one of your patients so what i really love is this understanding and this idea that there are some basics of health right there are some there are some common commonalities if we focus on the creation of health in the body if we focus on reducing inflammation in the body through hopefully lots of uh you know lifestyle practices we can tackle multiple different diseases even though we're not targeting them specifically and it's you know as you say that 478 breath it sounds like you use that as prevention as prophylaxis but also as treatment when somebody has a problem and i think this is in many ways changing the way that we look at medicine because we have been taught in a certainly i was trained what maybe 30 35 years after you but a very sort of quite a reductionist model we're very good at giving labels to different diseases we we separate off the body into different specialities and that can have value but also we we we forget that we want interconnected system and if you change one part of that system you also have a knock-on effect on other parts as well yeah let me give you an example with the 478 breath this is by far the most effective anti-anxiety measure that i've come across it makes the drugs that we use for anxiety to look very pathetic by comparison and i have used that in patients with the most extreme forms of panic disorder successfully although in some cases it took some time of regular practice for them to get control of it but the the difference between treating an anxiety attack or panic disorder with a drug like a benzodiazepine and with the 478 breath it's a very stark contrast when people are panicked or in anxiety states the subjective experience it usually is of being out of control if you deal with that by giving a a medication you reinforce the false idea that the locus of control is external and over time that method becomes less and less effective and often creates dependence if when a person discovers that they have within them the ability to control an anxiety state by regulation of the breath it's a revelation it's totally empowering and that method becomes more effective with repetition and creates greater independence and greater autonomy it just couldn't be a greater contrast of those two approaches yeah completely agree it's about putting it's just about it's about connecting the patient to what's going on the feeling that they have got some control over otherwise it's yeah i agree it's it's not only the fact that the treatment itself has very few if any side effects right so that's but it's awesome you know it's also about empowerment and i guess that kind of leads on to this term mind body medicine which i've heard you talk about a lot and i think it's worth kind of really trying to understand you know what do you mean when you say mind body medicine you know do you see the mind and body as separate does society see it as separate and you know what does that umbrella term really i think the only way you can separate mind and body is verbally i think they are two poles of the same reality uh and i think the uh the reigning paradigm in western science and medicine simply does not see that you know that we we have a materialistic paradigm in place uh that states that all that is real is that which is physical that which can be touched measured i guess in medicine taken out and that if you observe a change in the physical system the cause has to be physical non-physical causation of physical events simply is not allowed for in that paradigm and this is why mind-body interactions have been never accorded their proper due why research in that area has been stunted why hypnosis has never been fully accepted as a medical modality for example why we can't make sense of of uh wart cures i mean there's a whole range of things but that that is changing and some of the change has come about with validating placebo responses through brain imaging and showing that there are correlations with you know activity in particular areas of the brain so this makes it accessible to people gradually changing but i would say there's there's a whole range of therapies under the heading mind-body medicine from biofeedback hypnosis visualization and so forth in general these methods are very cost-effective time effective even fun for both practitioner and patient and yet they are very underutilized in medicine and they're underutilized because we just don't take this kind of stuff seriously in in my clinical experience i have again and again seen that the the root causes of illness are in the non-physical compartment unless that's dealt with um all the physical intervention that you do is not going to solve the problem it's tricky sometimes to present this to patients because many patients are very sensitive to being accused of making up their illness or imagining it that it's all in their head and that's not what is meant by this i i don't it's very difficult to use the term psychosomatic because of that connotation i don't think we've as a profession we've we've got a bit of a bad reputation in the past telling people that their ibs aerosol bowel syndrome is sort of kind of in their head or their fibromyalgia is sort of in their head and i think so there's a lot there's a real defensiveness from people understandably that understandably right the doctor's telling you ibs is clearly in the bowel as well as in the head and you know everything is is in both yeah it's uh it's really interesting that isn't that the mind and the body and i guess now we're getting this field of research which i'm interested as to what state this was in in the 60s and 70s but you know the last five ten years we've got the microbiome the gut brain axis lots of research showing this bi-directional communication between body or gut and the mind in our brains and you know did were you aware of this uh early on you know what what did the research say or did you just intuitively and through your experience know that this was going on i took a course in medical hypnosis at columbia university uh right after i finished my internship it was one of the most fascinating courses i ever took and uh certainly made me aware of the research that was out there and it and it totally resonated with my own interest so it's i've paid attention that for a long time i have a colleague that i've worked with for many years who's on our faculty who is a teaching member of the american academy of clinical hypnosis and i've sent him many patients and i remember early on him saying to me that he thought that every dermatological patient and every gi patient should first go to hypnotherapy before they went to dermatologists or gastroenterologists because those two systems of the body have had the highest ratio of innervation and connection to the mind and i've absolutely found that to be true and another uh experience i had uh shortly after he said that the the leading gastroenterologist in tucson asked me to have dinner with him he's in his 60s and he was very depressed and said that he hoped that i had something that could help him because he said 90 of the patients that he saw had conditions for which his training did not equip them to do anything about i mean that's remarkable and and i think this is absolutely the way it is and it's not just for gi disorders and dermatological disorders it applies to many other things as well and that doesn't mean you should not work on the physical problem but you want to also be working on the non-physical aspect of it if you enjoyed that clip from my podcast here's another powerful clip that is really going to help you with your health and happiness breathing is the life force and you are able to stop it to manipulate it take him out guys because you will be ready to take on any stressor in the world

Channel: Dr Chatterjee Clips

Views: 3,918

Keywords: rangan chatterjee, rangan chatterjee interview, rangan chatterjee podcast, rangan chatterjee clips, health interview, foods to eat, rangan chatterjee diet, rangan chatterjee pradip jamnadas, rangan chatterjee impact theory, inflammation, prevent disease, reverse aging

Id: P8yzN3vuWFQ

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023