Breathing Techniques For Healing - Dr Ekberg

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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