7 Truths To Lower Blood Pressure With Breathing Exercises (Holistic Doctor Explains) // Dr Ekberg

how to lower blood pressure by breathing over a billion people in the world have

high blood pressure and you can actually lower it by breathing but the question

is how does that work how do you do it correctly and most importantly how do

you do it in such a way that you get long-lasting results today we're going

to cover seven different concepts seven principles so that you really understand

everything about breathing and once you truly get the bigger picture then you

can not only lower your blood pressure but you could literally transform your

life coming right up

hey I'm dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss

anything so just a real quick review on what blood pressure is blood pressure is

the pressure that results from the heart contracting against the peripheral

resistance against the resistance from your blood vessels out in the body if

you didn't have your heart contract and if you didn't have your vasculature

resist there would be no blood pressure dead people have no blood pressure so

the key there to understand is that blood pressure doesn't happen to you

blood pressure is created with every beat of your heart the moment your heart

stops beating you have no blood pressure normal blood pressure depends on the

situation so resting blood pressure for someone

who is upright should be around 120 over 80 if you're laying down it should be

less because blood flows easier when it doesn't have to overcome gravity but on

the other hand if you're exercising you are putting a tremendous demand on your

body you're increasing demand of blood flow and nutrient delivery so you have

to increase your heart rate you have to increase your blood pressure it's

appropriate when you're exercising so during intense exercise you could

actually have 220 in blood pressure and that is normal so blood pressure is

created and it is dependent on the situation

the second thing to understand is that exercise is a form of stress stress

increases the demand on the body and when we have stress it's a matter of

balance between what's called your sympathetic and your parasympathetic

nervous system so those are big words what does that mean they're also known

as white flight sympathetic is fight flight

and parasympathetic is known as feed breed or rest digest and what these are

it is your autonomic nervous system the automatic portion of your nervous system

the part that handles everything that you don't have to think about it is a

resource allocation system okay blood delivers resources and your

autonomic nervous system decides where the blood goes so when you're exercising

then most of the blood should go to the muscles because that's where they're

needed to perform the work so your fight/flight system your sympathetic

nervous system sends most of the blood out to the muscles and then when you

relax hopefully then your fight/flight 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 got to pick one and that's what the body

does it allocates the resources depending on the situation so when you

have stress then 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 exercise is 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 heart rate 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 our default baseline but we still have a

lot of sympathetic activation 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 then 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 65 then 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 60 and 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 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 breaths then most people are going to breathe in

for about two seconds so in one two and out 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 be all 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 balance 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 we pay 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 it in 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 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 I did 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 a skill 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 and 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 and 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 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 is 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 norm 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 principle 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 it 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 digest it 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 hyper hydrosis 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 little sub 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 in 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 a 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 is 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 so 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 to be 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 breath to rise very gently and slightly 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 some tools 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 if you like this video I'm sure you're

going to love that one thank you so much for watching I'll see

you next time