- I'm Dr. Josh Axe, Doctor of Natural Medicine
and founder of DrAxe.com.
In this video, I'm gonna teach you
how to do certain breathing exercises
that can help you lower your blood pressure,
overcome respiratory issues,
sleep better and a whole lot more.
Let's dive in.
Now here's a thing to know.
Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medicine,
we're talking about some of
the most ancient forms of medicine,
recommended deep breathing exercises
to help you heal your body.
Now today we live in a world where we're constantly
holding our breath, we don't take deep breaths.
And what that does is it keeps us in what's called
a sympathetic state.
If you ever heard your doctor or somebody say,
if somebody gets really worked up, "Breathe,"
and that's how they'll calm their nervous system down?
It's true, most of us are living in a fight or flight state,
which basically means this.
It means that our adrenal glands
and our stress hormones are really high all the time,
which stresses our our organs and body
versus if you can start taking deep breaths,
it lowers cortisol so you age slower,
raises melatonin at night so you sleep better,
so you actually start turning back the clock and anti-aging.
Breathing deeply is so important for so many reasons,
and I'm gonna share with you a breathing technique
in just a minute.
But before I do, I wanted to mention
that medical studies today have shown
that deep breathing can help conditions like COPD,
it can help high blood pressure,
it can help anxiety,
it can even help your digestive health
and as I mentioned, it can help you sleep better,
and of course reducing stress.
So we want to be deep breathing on a regular basis.
Did you know that a lot of the ancient Chinese
and Ayurvedic exercises were about deep breathing.
Yoga, one of the things you'll do is do things like
fire breathing or deep breathing in and out
that helps cleanse your body and lungs.
But also, it helps calm your nervous system.
The ancient movements in Chinese medicine
called qi gong and tai chi are doing deep breathing
while you're doing different types of martial arts
and movements at the same time
to really help reset your nervous system.
And so again, deep breathing is a great way
to cleanse yourself and heal yourself,
and here's the technique I recommend.
Now listen, there are so many different techniques out there
on how you should breathe.
There's a 4-7-8, a 5-5-5, 7-7-7,
there's a lot of them, alright?
Here's what I'm gonna recommend for this video: 5-5-5.
You're gonna breathe in deeply for five seconds, so.
Hold your breath for five seconds,
then breathe out for five seconds, and do that five times.
Doing that several times a day
can help you reset your nervous system.
This is really especially to do
first thing when you wake up in the morning,
when you're in traffic and driving,
and before you go to bed at night.
Those are the three optimal times to start doing
these deep breathing exercises.
And again, by doing that 5-5-5,
five in, hold five, five out,
by doing that, remember here's what you're doing.
You are calming your entire,
you're telling your brain and nervous system,
"Oh there's no need to be worked up anymore.
"Hey, let's go ahead and calm
that fight or flight response down."
Cortisol can drop, stress hormones can drop.
Your other hormones and organs can
now start working properly.
Because think about this.
A fight or flight response,
if you're working out and exercising,
your body is in a little bit of a fight or flight response,
which is fine for the time being, okay?
But this is why, if you go out for a run,
you can't eat a cheeseburger at the same time,
or in the middle of a workout you'll throw it up.
Why is that?
It's 'cause your body is expending all of its energy.
It's in an emergency mode.
Your body is saying, "I'm sending my blood
to the extremities and brain."
That's where all your blood is.
So all of your energy now has left your insides,
so your digestive system now is weakened
at the time of exercise, so it's not digesting.
Your hormones are off in a different balance
for what it needs to be for healing certain organs.
That's what's happening when your stress hormones are high,
versus when your stress hormones are low,
or you're not exercising, your body is like, "Okay.
"Hey, all the blood can sort of leave my extremities.
"It can go to my center, helping me digest and balance."
I hope that makes sense, but that's the truth.
So what breathing can do,
breathing is gonna help you digest better.
Deep breathing is gonna help you sleep better.
It's gonna help improve your heart health,
it's gonna help improve your neurological health,
your hormonal health, almost every area
of your health improves when you lower those stress hormones
and you do deep breathing.
Five in, hold for five, five out, five times.
If you can start doing that a few times a day
you're gonna notice your health skyrocket
and improve at the same time.
So I hope you've enjoyed this video
on how to do deep breathing exercises for your health.