What I’m Watching: Breath Work

This is a podcast from High Intensity Health. I love his guests and I always learn a lot from him.

What I’m watching today:

Breath work is a really cool aspect of sport and mental well being that I only recently started paying attention to.

You might have heard of warrior breathing, or battle breathing as a strategy to calm the nervous system and the heart rate.

It seems that the effect has to do with stimulating the vagus nerve (the long nerve that runs along the spine and through your body). Breath work and meditation always seemed like woo to me, but as I get older, and as research is coming out which gives some mechanistic reasons for why deep breathing actually changes the nervous system, I open up to the idea.

Many ancient practices that seem silly on paper to our modern eyes seem to eventually come out as being actually beneficial. It’s almost like those ancient people knew something that we’ve forgotten. In this case, it’s diaphragmatic breathing and yoga.

This jumps right to an exercise that you can try to see if it calms your mind. I know I’ll be doing this if I feel anxious or need to perform.