your sympathetic can back off and allow your parasympathetic to get some of the blood and send it to your vital organs so that you can digest food and so that you can make immune cells and so that you can heal tissue so you can have an anabolic function so the key is to understand that these systems are like a seesaw that whenever you one system increases the other decreases because there’s only so much blood in the body and you can only send more in one direction at one time so if you send more one way you have to borrow from someplace else so the sympathetic and the parasympathetic the fight/flight and the feed breed it’s like a seesaw it’s like you’re driving a car you can’t speed up and slow down at the same time you gotta pick one and that’s what the body does it allocates the resources depending on the situation so when you have stress than it’s going to increase your heart rate it’s going to increase your blood pressure it’s going to increase your cortisol and your blood glucose and on and on and on when you are relaxing then resources are made available for your digestion your system and your healing so you can defend yourself you can stress or you can heal you just can’t do both at the same time you gotta pick one so 

number three thing to understand is that there are different types of stress exercises physical stress

but we also have what most people talk about when they say stress is emotional stress so in a sense we could say that exercise is very appropriate stress but emotional stress is sort of imaginary stress it’s not really a stress that demands a lot of physical exertion but your nervous system responds that way just in case it’s gonna increase your heartbeat your blood pressure your blood glucose your cortisol even if you’re just sitting in traffic and cursing the gridlock and the traffic jam when you’re getting stressed your body acts as if it’s a physical stress just in case and if we want to narrow down what emotional stress is in the simplest possible way the simplest way to describe it is to say that emotional stress is thoughts about the unwanted whenever you’re thinking about what you don’t want when you’re focusing on something that’s upsetting when you’re focusing on something that you’d like to be different then you have emotional stress and a lot of people will tell me that well you know my life is great I don’t have emotional stress I Don’t have any stress but this is a habit most of the stress we’re not even aware of because we’ve done it so much that it became a habit and we learned to live with it and we can just push it away and it becomes our norm it becomes your default baseline but we still have a lot of sympathetic activation

heart rate variability

 so that’s the very basics that we need to understand why breathing is going to work so now we get into the breathing and there’s something called heart rate variability and that’s exactly what it sounds like your heart rate varies so when you breathe in your heart speeds up when you breathe out your heart slows down and again your body is just so incredibly intelligent when you breathe in there’s more oxygen in the lungs so the body speeds up the heart rate to send more blood there to pick up the oxygen because that’s more efficient than you breathe out there is less oxygen so we slow down the heart rate so we don’t wasting resources

when you are in harmony when there is what’s called coherence in your nervous system between your brain and your heart then your heart rate variability is going to be coherent it’s going to form a smooth pattern like a sine wave so if you measure your average heart rate at 65then if you have a healthy heart rate variability it means that when you breathe in your heart rate is 70 when you breathe out your heart rate is 60and the average becomes 65 but it’s always going up and down up and down and this turns out to be one of the best indicators of overall health that

we know of people who are supremely healthy they have a fantastic smooth and large heart rate variability and people who are not so healthy they have more what’s called an incoherent pattern so when we’re frustrated when we’re angry then there is no pattern it’s just jagged lines the every heartbeat is sort of chaotic and mismatched it’s it’s all over the place so this would be a very healthy pattern and this would be a very unhealthy pattern and the great thing is that you can influence this you can practice it and learn it and get it better

breathing pattern

 and the way to do that is to pay attention to your breathing pattern most people if you don’t tell them anything you just tell them to kind of sit around and relax and you count their breaths you observe their breath when most people are going to breathe in for about two seconds so in one two andout one in one two and out one and that’s about 20 breaths per minute and even if they’re reasonably relaxed so it’s not a terribly incoherent pattern it’s still going to be too fast a pattern so if we’re breathing 20 times per minute it’s not enough time for the body to relax there’s not enough time for the body to kick in the parasympathetic

so it’s like we’re getting breathing in and we get sympathetic we start breathing out but before we’re done it’s breathe in and breathe in so there’s way way way too many breaths so if we have sympathetic on the upscale and parasympathetic on the down scale here then the breathing pattern would beall sympathetic the red here would be all sympathetic because it’s in and out in and out in and out in and out doesn’t give the body time to relax and for the parasympathetic nervous system to engage but if we slow the breath down if we breathe in for four seconds and out for five seconds we breathe approximately equal we breathe slower overall we breathe approximately equal but a little bit longer on the out-breath now we create balance between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system

so it’s not that one is good and the other is bad it’s like everything else in the body there needs to be balanced with this pattern we can start practicing that balance and the very first thing that happens when we start paying attention to our breathing pattern when we slow our breath down and we pay attention to the in-breath and wepay attention to the out-breath is we change our focus and that may seem like a small thing but it is one of the biggest things there is and we’ll try itin just a second here but we you pay attention to your breath you can no longer at the same time think about what unwanted try it if you’re stressed you have thinking about the kids or the deadlines and then you pay attention to your breath then for just a fleeting moment you didn’t think about that out of the thing and that is like I said may seem like a small thing but that is an incredibly powerful principle that you’re no longer doing that thing that keeps you in your state of emotional stress and if you do enough of that you can break the pattern and now that we break the pattern

neuroplasticity

 we need to understand what neuroplasticity is so a lot of people they say oh yeah I tried your breathing and it felt great I did it three months ago I tried it once and Idid it for five minutes and I felt great but the next day it was the same thing over and they’re not understanding the principle of neuroplasticity they’re not understanding the principle of habit and momentum it don’t be like the person who says oh diets don’t work I ate a carrot once and nothing happened all right that’s ridiculous it’s not about what we do once in a blue moon it’s about what we developed as a lifestyle it’s what becomes a pattern in our life so neuroplasticity means that

when you practice something and it becomes askill when you practice it enough to becomes a skill and then you maintain that skill then you actually reconfigure the tissue in your brain your neural pathways become different a neural pathway that you practice it that you use a lot it becomes thicker think of it as walking across the lawn if you just walk across a lawn once then you bending the blades of grass and then immediately they stand up and it’s like you never walk across if you walk across a hundred times now the grass is going to look a little flat and you can start discerning a pathway

if you walk across a hundred times every day then the grass is not going to be there there’s going to be a pathway and that’s exactly how it works in your nervous system that the things you do more of become pathways they become larger pathways and if you do it enough it becomes a superhighway that has traffic on it whether you think about it or not this is exactly the principle that’s in place when you’re right-handed versus left-handed okay do you think someone tells you to to write something down and you grab your pen in your preferred hand and you just start writing without thinking but if they tell you to switch hands all of a sudden you have no idea what to do you have to focus intensely

it’s gonna go super slow and it’s not going to be pretty why is because you you don’t know how no you understand the mechanics but you’d haven’t developed the skill the pathway isn’t there the neuro motor patterns aren’t developed another way of thinking about that is like a concert pianist just because you’d practice on the piano for five minutes doesn’t mean you know how to play piano but if you play a few hours every day for twenty years all of a sudden you can play and have a conversation at the same time you’ve developed so many pathways that it’s going on automatic that’s what neuroplasticity

i understand that stress is the same way your have your habit your habitual way of focusing on things you don’t want is a habit emotional stress is a habit and you can develop a skill you can develop a momentum that’s the opposite of that habit and then that habit goes away so what that means is it’s going to be as good as what you into it and my recommendation would be to do it once or twice a day for five to ten minutes and I want you to do it until you notice results and you will start noticing results very very soon but if you stop then the habit goes away so I would say set your goal to do it for at least six months because if you do it six months you’re probably in the habit that you’ll keep doing it forever and once you have that kind of habit once you have that pattern chances are that you will even start breathing you’ll even get into that emotional state when you’re not thinking about it it becomes your normal regardless of where you are you can do it in in school you can be that way in business meetings and sales meetings wherever you are with a kid screaming at you you can still be that way 

so the number seven principles to understand is that the benefits

to this are endless it may seem like I ‘m over promising but if you truly understand that you’re sympathetic and you’re parasympathetic that is what your autonomic nervous system is that is what your health is that is the system that determines how you function determines everything about you so if you do this on a regular basis it’s not just that your blood pressure goes down you are rewiring all of you so what you will find is that sure your blood pressure will go down but so will your cortisol and so will your insulin resistance and your circulation will improve so you all of a sudden you end up with warm hands you’re in your digestion will improve you will get more nutrients out of your food we spent all of our time talking about what to eat but how do we digest it well we digestit by activating our parasympathetic nervous system immune function to have fewer colds and flus you heal better even your fertility is a matter of sympathetic versus parasympathetic cuz you can’t get pregnant when you’re stressed your body says hey this is not a good place to get pregnant we better wait till it’s safe to have a kid if you have sweaty hands

if you suffer from hyperhidrosis whether it’s sweating in the palm or under the arms that’s stress if you activate if you practice activating your parasympathetic nervous system that will go away how quickly for some people it’ll happen in a week for some people it will take six months so don’t stop after a week because when you’re doing this you’re sending more blood to the frontal lobe and to the cortex of your brain you also are probably going to notice that your focus gets better your memory gets better and the list is endless pretty much anything you want you can put it on that list and if you get your sympathetic and parasympathetic imbalance it’s gonna improve so even though this is a video about how to lower blood pressure

I want you to start looking at the bigger picture of holistic health that there aren’t littlesub compartments of function the nervous system your body your organism works as a whole when you when you truly improve an aspect by helping the foundation of it you’re automatically going to get a trickle-down effect that’s going to improve multiple things so now for the patient ones who are still sticking around or watching the whole thing because you’re serious about your health and understanding let’s do a little breathing session so you could do this to yourself you don’t have to count out loud but here’s just an example of how that would work

you count breathe in two three four and out two three four five and in two three four and out two three four five and two three four and out two three four five now what you want to think about is it is a little bit deeper breath than shallow breath like a normal shallow breath a lot of people have but it’s not filling your lungs to full capacity it’s not deep breathing it’s not panting it’s just a little bit deeper and you want to initiate you want to breathe from your belly so a good way of doing it is to put your hand on your belly and as you breathe in you notice your hand rising you notice your belly expanding the first part of the breath your hand is rising your belly is expanding and then that the first half of the breath is that and then slowly and gently you allow the breath to rise into your ribcage and expand your your lungs and your chest just a little bit and then you relax and just let it out very very slowly and if you breathe through your nose which

I recommend then there should be no sound at no point should you breathe hard enough to make a sound it should be completely quiet both in and out and think of it as a sine wave as valleys and Peaks and when you’re breathing in at the top there’s going tobe a moment where you don’t notice you’re not sure if you’re breathing in or out it’s just kind of like hanging there and then you breathe out slowly and silently and then at the bottom there is a moment where you’re not sure if you’re breathing in or out and then all of a sudden the breath is just happening by itself again and again it’s slow and silent you don’t want to start using your shoulders you don’t want to get into raising your shoulders when you breathe because that’s a stress response okay you’re backfiring on on your parasympathetic activation

if you raise your shoulders that this is a stress response when we get attacked that’s part of fight flight we bring the shoulders up that’s why stress causes shoulder and and neck stiffness so keep your shoulders relaxed breathe from the belly allow the bread to rise very gently and lightly into the chest and then out again so let’s try that just one more time breathe in two three four and out two three four five and in two three four and out two three four five okay so there’s sometools there’s some toys on the market you can buy to help you breathe you can learn to breathe so you can get some feedback if you’re doing it right but you don’t need any expensive tools if you want them great there can be fun to play with but if you just pay attention you’ll get all the same benefits anyway.