Breathwork 101: Reduce Stress, Enhance Sleep & 5 Practices to Try Now

#166:

Over the last two years, I’ve used breathwork to reduce anxiety, fall asleep with ease, get myself awake and alert in the morning and even…

….enhance the quality of my erections.

Seriously.

It turns out the nose is more intimately connected to the genitals than any other organ.

That’s just one of the many incredible benefits of breathing intentionally.

The problem is, humans are terrible breathers.

According to James Nestor, author of the NY Times Best Selling book Breath, “Humans are the worst breathers in the animal kingdom.”

90% of us are breathing incorrectly. 40% of today’s population suffers from chronic nasal obstruction. Most of use only 10% of our diaphragm’s capacity.

If you experience any of the following, elevating the quality of your breathing is essential:

• If you feel a chronic state of low-grade (or high grade) stress
• If you have chronically obstructed nasal passages
• If you have a hard time being present/in the moment
• If you have a hard time falling or staying asleep
• If you snore/have sleep apnea
• If you have a hard time waking up in the morning
• If you feel fatigued more often than you want
• If you feel unusually sore in the days after workouts
• If you’ve ever had a panic attack

Many of these issues are attributed to 1 of 3 poor breathing patterns:

1. Mouth Breathing (Solution: Nose Breathing)
2. Chest Breathing (Solution: Belly Breathing)
3. Over Breathing (Solution: Balanced Breathing)

In this episode

• Different breathwork techniques for reducing stress, falling asleep faster, activating energy and yes…enhancing the quality of your erections
• We unpack two incredible books – Breath by James Nestor and The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown – which give us the history for how we’ve become such terrible breathers, and the science behind how proper breathing makes nearly everything about how we feel…better
• The counterintuitive science of how oxygen gets to the muscles, tissues and organs (spoiler alert: it’s not by breathing more or taking deeper breaths)

5 breathwork practices you can implement right now

1. Box Breathing: For alert and relaxed state of being
2. 4, 7, 8 Breathing: For sleep, stress reduction and short-circuiting anxiety
3. Wim Hof Hyperventilating Breathing: For energy
4. Solo Nostril Breathing: For either activating energy, or calming your nervous system
5. Humming Breathing: For nitric oxide production (read: strong erections)