Master The Art of Breath Work

Introduction to breathing techniques 0:00

Hi It's Dr. Jen, I want to just talk about some easy breath techniques that you can use

Box breathing demonstration 0:18

and the two are fox breathing and the four, seven, eight breath. Okay, so we'll start out with fox breathing. This one is very simple. I will use this for my children. I will use it sometimes. And we're just. And it's like a box for inhaling, exhaling, both. Inhale, exhale, fold, inhale, fold. Exhale, open. And now, fold. Exhale, fold. So you just imagine going around like a box and slowing down that breath, bringing that parasympathetic, that rest and digest up in the forefront. Right. So our sympathetic nervous system is the fighter flight and run from the bear.

And we're not supposed to be

Why calming the nervous system matters 1:18

in that mindset, in that part of our autonomic nervous system. We're not supposed to be in that all the time, because if we're running from the bear, we're not going to be digesting our food. We're not going to be wanting to reproduce. We're going to hormone problems. Our thyroid is going to be shunting everything to reverse T3, which we don't want. We want our thyroid hormones to be in free T3 in the T3, the active thyroid hormone. So that's why we want to do that. The next one is, of course, I'm eight breath, so practice this so it's three times through and then you're going to want to practice it throughout the day and then when you really need it, you can use it.

So I'll do this in the car sometimes just to get it in driving. Sometimes I'll do it in the car. I'm running late and traffic seems to be backed up and I'm just a little frustrated. I'm like, This is not good.

Four-seven-eight breathing practice 2:16

I don't want my body to feel this stress. It's going to affect my adrenal glands, it's going to affect my thyroid. So I'll do the four, seven, eight breath. Also, I use a lot of prayer and scripture and I meditate on that. So that is really helpful to me. So let's practice the first of any breath. So inhale for four, four, four, seven, exhale for eight. Inhale, four, four, four, four, seven. Exhale, four, eight. One more time through. Inhale, four, four, four, four, seven. Exhale, three. I feel a lot calmer socially.

You know, we have deadlines going on, all this stuff. So it's really important to make sure that we are not in that constant fight or flight.

Using breathwork in daily stress 3:28

Okay. It's really important for our health, especially for the thyroid, because our adrenal glands and our thyroid are connected. Okay. So if you are like me and you watch all these videos on 1.5 times or two times the speed, you're going to want to go back and practice this again and write it down and use these in every day. So thank you so much for being here.