How to Hack Your Nervous System in Two Minutes

This post about our breath and nervous system was originally published on July 21, 2019 on Medium,

Yogis believe that our breath holds tremendous power: modern science agrees. How fast we breathe, how long we inhale vs how long we exhale, how long we pause between our breaths, all of this, and more, affects our neurological, emotional and physiological systems. Ultimately, learning how to control our breath teaches us how to manipulate our nervous system to our advantage.

As a yoga teacher for over 15 years (at the time of writing this), I know the power of breath. In yoga, we call breath Prana, or Life Force. The practice of breath control becomes Pranayama, Prana (Breath) +Yama (Discipline.) The beautiful power of Breath Discipline is that it works for everyone, no matter what your background or life status. I’ve taught these techniques to stressed out, performance-drug addicted executives, world-famous athletes, movie stars, Grammy-winning record producers and Beverly Hills moms. I’ve also taught them to janitors in inner-city schools and mothers in labor. And guess what? The results work the exact same way, no matter who is on the receiving end. It doesn’t matter if your household staff is 50 people or if you ARE the staff…if you can breathe and control your breath, you can learn to control your nervous system.

Yoga mythos believes that the breath is the key to the body being in balance, much like the tenets of TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine.) When the body is out of balance, then dis-ease enters the system. But a system in balance is able to repel and heal dis-ease. Though science has yet (or may never?) confirm this, we all know and feel intuitively better when we live lives in balance and when we focus on taking the proverbial few deep breaths.

Too busy for this sh*t?

That’s OK. I get it.

You’re not alone.

The beauty of this is that all I’m asking for is two minutes of your day. And hey, if it doesn’t work for you, all you’ve committed to are two minutes.

Breath Discipline (Pranayama): Where Science Meets Yoga

Lengthening our exhale induces a state of calm and focus because it stimulates our Vagus nerve, which, in turn, controls our heart rate and our state of relaxation.

Within two minutes of this type of breathing, measurable differences begin, amongst them, our parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) wakes up and the body goes into a state of rest and digest, as opposed to a state of fight or flight. (PsychologyToday)

Alternate Nostril Breath endows our lives with another easy-to-use Breath Discipline technique backed by science. Breath through just the right nostril and hack your nervous system into thinking it just had a jolt of caffeine. Breathe through just the left nostril and the nervous system responds as if you had a mini nap.

Throughout the day, our body shifts its rhythmical breathing pattern. This ongoing shift acts like a swing, a little to the right, then a little to the left. During several hours at a time, we breathe predominately through the right nostril, which activates our energetic state; during other cycles, we breathe predominately through the left nostril, which activates our resting state.

Ideally, our patterns are even, which regulates the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and parasympathetic systems (PNS). But with stress, our rhythmical breath pattern gets thrown off and we enter a state of imbalance.

This National Institute of Health study confirms that breathing through one nostril can alter metabolism, and have a “marked activating effect or relaxing effect on the sympathetic nervous system.” This NIH study confirms The Effects of Pranayama Breathing on the Parasympathetic Nervous System.

People have written much more deeply about this than I have. I like this (non NIH) article cuz it contains loads of research backing it up. Basically, alternate nostril breathing can regulate our SNS and PNS.

Tutorial: How to Get In Touch with Your Power through the Breath

Let’s practice this together. Please make sure you’re not driving when you do this. Thank you.

General Breath prep:
Exhale Completely.

Begin your inhale. No stress, here. Just a simple and gentle, pleasant, expanding breath.
Count slowly as you inhale (doesn’t matter how long.)

Now pause, hold the breath in(skip the breath retention if you’re pregnant.)
Sip in a tiny bit more breath…and a tiny bit more…and let it all out.
Count slowly as you exhale (doesn’t matter how long.)

Repeat, this time attempt to match the count of your inhale to your exhale.

Repeat, again, once more attempting to match the inhale and the exhale.
Complete and Enjoy!

Breath Discipline, your Nervous System Hack

How to Discipline Your Breath:
Exhale completely, and now place your awareness at the base of your diaphragm.

Inhale slowly…imagine stretching out and slowing down your breath 10% or 20% from where it just was. Visualize a piece of taffy, slowly stretching…allow your breath to stretch out like that taffy. Slowly expand into the low back, then outwards, sideways, into the lowest bottom ribs. Imagine the ribcage extending to the sides.

Continue slowly inhaling…
Allow the breath to move upwards into the mid back, just underneath the shoulder blades, then in between the shoulder blades and now across the upper side ribs and into the chest.

Continue slowly breathing in…
Imagine expanding that breath into the armpits themselves and every part of your lungs, into your collar bones and finally the sternum, the neck and the skull. Pause …

Now hold the breath. (Skip breath retention if you are pregnant.) At this crest of the inhale, this pause marks a state of complete expansion.

Count slowly, now, as you release the breath…all that glorious inhale, let it go. Hold onto nothing. Let out every single last molecule until the body is empty, silent, complete, until there is nothing left within you, until ever last bit of the spine, the ribs, the lungs has softened.

Pause for as long as comfortable (Skip holding this sensation of discharged breath if you’re pregnant.) Right here, right now, at the tail end of your exhale, this is a pause of completion.

Now that you know how to control the length of your inhale and your exhale, it’s up to you how much longer you want to make your exhale. If you want to hack your nervous system, practice with extending the count of your exhale just one or two beats more than your inhale.

If at any point you feel anxious, faint or dizzy, please stop! Come back to a normal breath and reduce your retention counts.

The Magic Unifying Principle: Where Yoga Mysticism Meets Life

Yogis believe that a sacred energy, a connection to the Divine source, emerges in these pauses. They call it Sahaja Khumbhaka, which translates as Natural Breath Retention, referring to the gradual process when holding the breath becomes almost reflexive.

The yogis believe that in learning how to control those pauses, we learn how to access the Divinity within.

I don’t advocate any one path to Divinity; what I find fascinating is that these ancient practices that yoga, meditation and breath discipline teach us also correlate with modern science.

So… think about this for a moment: How in the world did the yogis know this? Why and how do these somewhat bizarre breath exercises sync up with scientific analysis?

Who knows, really?

I believe that somewhere within the intersection of magic, myth, divine knowledge and evidence-based research is an energetic state that communicates knowledge from being to being. Call it the ether, morphic resonance, the collective unconscious…call it what you will. If there is an energetic field that transmits gravitational and electromagnetic forces, why not also knowledge and collective wisdom? Something that connects us to the magic that creates life over and over again.

As we continue our saunter down the yogic metaphoric path, I invite you to entertain the thought that perhaps, just perhaps this space of Divinity exists in the Sahaja Kumbhaka, the space of breath retention between the inhale — exhale — inhale. And just perhaps, if we can all learn to access and control that state, we can also access and control our nervous system and hack it to our advantage.

I Use Breath Discipline to Release Anxiety During Uncertain Times:

I’m sharing these techniques this with you because I am in the state of Kumbhaka right now. I’m in the farewell stages with LA, a magical, mystical, grandiose town packed with possibilities, personalities, dreams and adventures, my home since my freshmen year at UCLA, in 1991.

Ahhh… LA LA LAND…this town sometimes whispers, sometimes shouts and other times drowns me in her stories. I love LA. She made me who I am. And now I’m ready to expand into something unknown and something new.

I‘ve been asked, why am I leaving my it all behind.

Why San Diego? What’s out there for me? Am I moving for a job?
Nope.

Found a cool place to live?
I’m working on it.

I’m moving because after my mom died, I want to be closer to my brother.
I’m moving because it’s time to leave LA.
And I’m moving because to San Diego I know that it’s where I need to go next.

Life has been opening up paths for me, confirming my choices. And sure, I’ve had had moments of panic. What the hell was I doing? Oh my gawd. Really, Aria?

… I felt the ground shift underneath me…

Then, it all came back to me. A deep inhale. A pause. An even deeper exhale.

This is my pause, my place of expansion and of completion. I write this on a hill overlooking my old home in Topanga Canyon. I can see the wooden deck on which I used to practice yoga and qi gong. My perspective of my old place is quite surreal.

Where I once stood, I now see … What I once saw, I now am.