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It was the constant stress of chewing that was lacking from our diets—not vitamin A, B, C, or D. Ninety-five percent of the modern, processed diet was soft.
Our ancient ancestors chewed for hours a day, every day. And because they chewed so much, their mouths, teeth, throats, and faces grew to be wide and strong and pronounced.
What looked like human progress—all that milling, mass distribution, and preservation of food—had horrible consequences.
our caved-in faces and too-small mouths had become obstacles to that clear path.
Sprays, rinses, and allergy medications can help quickly clear minor congestion, but for more serious chronic obstruction, we’ll need a surgeon to plumb the path.
About three-quarters of modern humans have a deviated septum clearly visible to the naked eye, which means the bone and cartilage that separate the right and left airways of the nose are off center.
Friedman tongue position scale, and it’s used to quickly estimate breathing ability.
Ninety percent of the obstruction in the airway occurs around the tongue, soft palate, and tissues around the mouth.
The smaller the mouth is, the more the tongue, uvula, and other tissues can obstruct airflow.
He explained that the first step to improving airway obstruction wasn’t orthodontics but instead involved maintaining correct “oral posture.” Anyone could do this, and it was free. It just meant holding the lips together, teeth lightly touching, with your tongue on the roof of the mouth. Hold the head up perpendicular to the body and don’t kink the neck. When sitting or standing, the spine should form a J-shape—perfectly straight until it reaches the small of the back, where it naturally curves outward. While maintaining this posture, we should always breathe slowly through the nose into the
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tongue-thrusting exercises, which he says can train us out of the “death pose” and make breathing easier.
mewing without seeing it, but the gist is to push the back of the tongue against the back roof of the mouth and move the rest of the tongue forward, like a wave, until the tip hits just behind the front teeth.
our noses and mouths are not predetermined at birth, childhood, or even in adulthood. We can reverse the clock on much of the damage that’s been done in the past few hundred years by force of will, with nothing more than proper posture, hard chewing, and perhaps some mewing.
I’m calling these potent techniques Breathing+,
calling these potent techniques Breathing+,
Breathing+ can offer a deeper view into the secrets of our most basic biological function.
Da Costa would call the malady Irritable Heart Syndrome.
Breathing is a power switch to a vast network called the autonomic nervous system.
The first, called the parasympathetic nervous system, stimulates relaxation and restoration.
it’s sometimes called the “feed and breed” system.
The second half of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic, has an opposite role.6 It sends stimulating signals to our organs, telling them to get ready for action.
pupils dilate, palms sweat, the mind sharpens.7, 8 Sympathetic states help ease pain and keep blood from draining out if we get injured. They make us meaner and leaner, so we can fight harder or run faster when confronted with danger.
Although sympathetic stress takes just a second to activate, turning it off and returning to a state of relaxation and restoration can take an hour or more.
Naropa harnessed the power of his breath to keep himself from freezing to death. The practice became known as Tummo, the Tibetan word for “inner fire.”
It is conscious stress. “This is something you are doing to yourself—not something happening to you!”
How exactly can conscious extreme breathing hack into the autonomic nervous system?
vagus nerve, a meandering network within the system that connects to all the major internal organs.14 The vagus nerve is the power lever; it’s what turns organs on and off in response to stress.
To some researchers, it’s no coincidence that eight of the top ten most common cancers affect organs cut off from normal blood flow during extended states of stress.
another, less invasive way Porges found to stimulate the vagus nerve: breathing.
Willing ourselves to breathe slowly will open up communication along the vagal network and relax us into a parasympathetic state.
This practice of heavy breathing along with regular cold exposure was later discovered to release the stress hormones adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine on command.
He signed up for Hof’s ten-week video course,
Here’s the information: To practice Wim Hof’s breathing method, start by finding a quiet place and lying flat on your back with a pillow under your head. Relax the shoulders, chest, and legs. Take a very deep breath into the pit of your stomach and let it back out just as quickly. Keep breathing this way for 30 cycles. If possible, breathe through the nose; if the nose feels obstructed, try pursed lips. Each breath should look like a wave, with the inhale inflating the stomach, then the chest. You should exhale all the air out in the same order. At the end of 30 breaths, exhale to the natural
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“The human is not only an organism … it is also a mind whose strength used wisely can allow us to repair our body when it wobbles,”
“[Tummo] is for the reconstitution of man’s immune system,”
Czech psychiatrist named Stanislav Grof.
The amygdalae help monkeys, humans, and other high-order vertebrates remember, make decisions, and process emotions.
These nodes are also believed to be the alarm circuit of fear, signaling threats and initiating a reaction to fight or run away.2 Without
fear was the core of all anxieties: a fear of gaining weight led to anorexia; fear of crowds led to agoraphobia; fear of losing control led to panic attacks. Anxieties were an oversensitivity to perceived fear, be it spiders, the opposite sex, confined spaces, whatever. On a neuronal level, anxieties and phobias were caused by overreactive amygdalae.
The amygdalae were not the only “alarm circuit of fear.” There was another, deeper circuit in our bodies that was generating perhaps a more powerful sense of danger than anything the amygdalae alone could muster.
It was the deep fear and crushing anxiety that comes from the feeling of not being able to take another breath.
The nagging need to breathe is activated from a cluster of neurons called the central chemoreceptors, located at the base of the brain stem.3 When we’re breathing too slowly and carbon dioxide levels rise, the central chemoreceptors monitor these changes and send alarm signals to the brain, telling our lungs to breathe faster and more deeply. When we’re breathing too quickly, these chemoreceptors direct the body to breathe more slowly to increase carbon dioxide levels. This is how our bodies determine how fast and often we breathe, not by the amount of oxygen, but by the level of carbon
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we’re conditioned to panic when we’re denied a breath or think we’re about to be. But the scientific reason for that panic—that it can be generated by chemoreceptors and breathing instead of by external psychological threats processed by the amygdalae—is profound.
Perhaps the best step in treating them, and hundreds of millions of others around the world, was by first conditioning the central chemoreceptors and the rest of the brain to become more flexible to carbon dioxide levels. By teaching anxious people the art of holding their breath.
he’d become convinced carbon dioxide could not only cause panic and anxiety, but that it might also help cure it. He believed that breathing heavy doses of carbon dioxide might elicit the same physical and psychological benefits as the thousand-year-old breathholding techniques.
wealth of scientific research shows that meditation can change the structure and function of critical areas of the brain, help relieve anxieties, and boost focus and compassion.
But everyone breathes, and, today, few of us breathe well. Those with the worst anxieties consistently suffer from the worst breathing habits.
People with anorexia or panic or obsessive-compulsive disorders consistently have low carbon dioxide levels and a much greater fear of holding their breath.
To avoid another attack, they breathe far too much and eventually become hypersensitized to carbon dioxide and panic if they sense a rise in this gas.24 They are anxious because they’re overbreathing, overbreathing because they’re anxious.
panic, like asthma, is usually preceded by an increase in breathing volume and rate and a decrease in carbon dioxide.
