Key Takeaways
- Your breath is a key pillar in your health and wellness
- Nose breathing helps you stay in aerobic rather than anaerobic, which is 16x more effective
- The body craves more carbon dioxide, not oxygen. It is the chief hormone if the entire body
- Slow breathing, particularly exhalation, has tremendous positive benefits. People breathe too much, breathe less and as lightly as possible
- Lung capacity is most tightly correlated to longevity. Not blood pressure or HRV or anything else – lung capacity. There are many breathing and stretching videos you can check out at Nestor’s site
- Buteyko breathing and other practices that help you slow down your breathing and breathe less have shown remarkably effective in helping all sorts of diseases. Counterintuitively, You want to increase the carbon dioxide in your blood. Increase the time for exhalation, rest, inhalation – it is no wonder or surprise that slowing down your breathing and heart rate can help you live longer. The ideal is 5.5 inhales and exhales per minute
- The modern diet has shrunken our mouths, faces, and airways, making us terrible breathers. However, it isn’t just the vitamins, but the softness of our foods. Our ancestors chewed for hours per day which gave us a wide and strong mouth and jaw
- Proper posture, a lot of chewing of hard foods, and some mewing will help improve your breathing
- Those with the worst anxiety tend to have the worst breathing – fast and shallow. Simply by learning how to breathe properly, panic attacks and general anxiety were greatly reduced
- Prana (life force, chi, rua, etc…) is a very little understood force. It isn’t hormones or oxygen, but something more. Master yogis have shown that they can focus their prana on different parts of the body to have it heat up, sweat, slow down / speed up their hearts, etc.
What I got out of it
- Loved learning about the lengths Nestor went to learn about breathing. This is such a ubiquitous and automatic process, yet in today’s world it has been hijacked and is something we need to bring into our consciousness. Simply breathe slower, through your nose
