breathing techniques for healing coming right up
am doctor Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to learn how to get as
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anything breathing can be very very important for
your health and how you breathe place a very big role of course no one is going
to forget to breathe period your body is going to make sure that you breathe
somehow but if you learn a specific technique you can actually create a
relaxation response that can improve your healing dramatically when you
breathe in your heart speeds up when you breathe out your heart slows down
because your body is so smart that when you breathe in there's more air in the
lungs so the body sends more blood there to pick up the oxygen and then when you
breathe out vice versa the only thing that can make the heart speed up is
called the sympathetic nervous system a stress response so every time that you
breathe in you're having a tiny tiny little stress response and every time
that you breathe out you have a little relaxation response or parasympathetic
response so when you breathe let's say your heart rate is about 60 then on an
in-breath it's actually about 65 and on an out breath it's about 55 it's
averaging 60 and the better that change better that heart rate variability works
the healthier you are it's actually a very very good indicator of overall
health and health potential it turns out you can influence this by breathing a
certain way so when you breathe in you fire off your stress response when you
breathe out you fire off your relaxation response in your nervous system so for
most people what happens in two is they breathe in for a couple of seconds and
then they breathe out really really fast so there's not time enough there's not
long enough time on the out breath for the
parasympathetic nervous system to engage so what we want to do is we want to slow
down the in-breath some and we want to slow down the out-breath a whole lot
compared to how we normally breathe so a good breath would be to breathe in for
four to five seconds and then breathe out for five to six
seconds breathe in four to five seconds fire off the sympathetic stress response
breathe out five to six seconds a little bit longer to fire off the relaxation
response or the parasympathetic response so some people don't understand how
profound these things can be because they think that oh well you I so I
breathe for five minutes and I relax for five minutes but then I have to go about
my day and then I'm just distressed that's before but that's not true
if you just do it once then it is true because you'll only feel good for a few
minutes that you do it but if you do it on a regular basis
you're going to in train a pattern you're going to up regulate you're gonna
strengthen you're gonna build a better machinery better stronger pathways for
the relaxation response so every time that you breathe in you fire off the
sympathetics that means you activate the fibers and the cells associated with
your sympathetic nervous system and when you breathe out you fire up the nerves
and pathways and cells associated with your parasympathetic nervous system and
every time that you activate something especially on a regular basis you will
strengthen you will up regulate that pathway will become stronger that
pathway will engage more readily in the future so that if you do these breathing
exercises regularly you will become a more relaxed person this is using a
principle called neuroplasticity so that anything that you do more
gets stronger anything that you do less of gets weaker it takes up less real
estate you're building new tissue in the brain when you strengthen something when
you activate something and you're deteriorating you're creating atrophy
when you don't use something so your brain is responding to your behavior
anything that you do a lot of will get stronger so if you practice a lot of
relaxation you become a more relaxed person how about that so let me show you
how this works let's do a quick and easy demonstration so what you want to do is
put your hand on your stomach so you can feel it expanding so when you breathe in
you can follow my hand so you breathe in two three four and out two three four
five and in two three four and out two three four five that's the basic pattern
this has been researched a tremendous amount by heart math Institute there's
another video that I did that was dedicated exclusively to heart rate
variability and some of the research that they had done it's pretty powerful
stuff so that's the pace now one more thing we want to know is that there's a
few different places that we can breathe in the body the first is the stomach so
a belly breath that's the that's the relaxed and healthy way of breathing
that's the fundamental way of breathing your diaphragm which is a dome-shaped
muscle sits right under the rib cage and when it contract it flattens and it
pulls it sucks down the lungs so that they inflate that's the basic one the
second one is your rib cage so when you breathe in your rib cage acts like sort
of a hinge and they can expand and move out to allow for more expand
tension and there's muscles between the ribs that can help do that the third one
is the shoulders and the neck muscles the upper trapezius muscles so when you
lift your shoulders you're pulling the lungs away from the diaphragm so out of
these three the only one you really want to use when you're relaxing is the
diaphragm then when you breathe a little bit heavier like exercise then you use
the expansion of the ribcage and a little bit of the shoulders as well and
when you have an emergency when you've got to get as much air in as possible
that's when you use all three use the diaphragm the ribcage and the shoulder
muscles but when you're relaxing you definitely want to pay attention to the
shoulder muscles you relax them because they're associated with a crisis and
exercise breathing they're also associated with a stress response with a
sympathetic nervous system so when you pull your shoulders up you automatically
activate a stress response so put a hand on the belly feel it expanding with the
breath and feel it falling when you're breathing out with the exhalation so we
call this breathing exercises for healing where does the healing come into
it so far we talked about relaxation well it turns out it's actually the same
thing because the sympathetic and parasympathetic that we talked about the
relaxation is about activating the parasympathetic and deactivating the
sympathetic so the parasympathetic nervous system is the one that involved
with your digestion and with your immune system and with your reproduction and
with your healing any sort of repair any sort of anabolism rebuilding is
controlled exclusively by your parasympathetic nervous system so when
you're stressed you can't do any of those things when you relax you're
allowing your body to do more it's that simple so you don't it's not
just about feeling better it's not just about being more at peace those states
of being relaxed and at peace also improve your healing they're allowing
your body to do the healing that it's designed to do you enjoy this sort of
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