Make a conscious effort to breathe through your nose throughout the day and night. Your nose acts as the body’s first line of defense, filtering pollution, allergens, viruses, and pathogens, and helps prevent snoring and sleep apnea.
Apply a small piece of tape (postage stamp size) over your mouth at night to encourage nasal breathing. This simple hack can lead to better sleep, feeling fresher, reduced snoring, and prevents dehydration and pH changes that contribute to cavities.
Begin your breathwork journey by inhaling through your nose to a count of five or six, then exhaling to the same count. Practice this for 10-20 cycles and observe how your body feels, as it can elicit a strong positive response.
Use breathwork as a tool to gain greater self-awareness and quiet external noise. This practice helps you listen to internal signals, allowing you to better understand your state of stress and overall well-being.
While walking, after 5-10 minutes of nasal breathing, exhale normally, then hold your breath and walk until you feel a medium air hunger, repeating 5-10 times. This practice improves carbon dioxide (CO2) tolerance, which is linked to reduced panic, asthma, and anxiety.
Focus on expanding your rib cage and belly outward and inward (laterally) when you breathe, rather than just up and down. This engages the diaphragm more effectively, improves rib cage flexibility, and allows for easier, more complete lung inflation, enhancing breathing efficiency and posture.
Engage in practices that increase your lung size and improve lung function. Lung capacity and function are significant markers of lifespan, and maintaining or improving them can lead to a longer, healthier life.
Incorporate ‘super breathing techniques’ like the Wim Hof method for about 20 minutes to purposely stress your body in a controlled way. This focused, periodic stress helps you control your stress response, leading to greater calm and control during the rest of your day.
If you have anxiety, asthma, or panic, begin breathing practices very slowly, such as three seconds in and three seconds out, then gradually extend the duration as comfortable. This gentle approach prevents exacerbating symptoms like hyperventilation and allows your body and mind to acclimate.
Work on specific breathing practices to significantly reduce or even eliminate asthma symptoms and anxiety. Scientific studies and clinicians have shown that conscious breathing practices can have these profound effects.
Practice nasal breathing during exercise, even for endurance activities like marathons. This can improve recovery, sleep quality, and lead to a quicker reduction in heart rate post-exercise, making activities more physiologically harmonious.
Combine approaches from both Eastern (e.g., breathing practices) and Western medicine for your health. Both have enormous benefits, and integrating them, rather than choosing one over the other, is key for comprehensive health management.
If a child has ADHD, investigate and improve their breathing quality during the day and night. A significant percentage of ADHD cases in children are linked to sleep-disordered breathing, and improving breathing can help overcome these issues.
For young children, encourage breastfeeding as long as possible and wean them onto hard, unprocessed foods. This promotes the natural development of proper facial structure and breathing anatomy, preventing issues like crooked teeth and small mouths that impact breathing.
Consider attending a weekend workshop to learn Sudarshan Kriya, a structured breathing technique. This practice can elicit profound physical and mental responses, offering clarity and calmness, and has over 100 independent scientific studies validating its effectiveness for panic, anxiety, asthma, and autoimmune problems.
Do not stress about occasional mouth breathing, such as when laughing, sighing, or during short bursts of peak athletic performance. The focus should be on habitual nasal breathing, not an absolute prohibition of mouth breathing.