Brain & Mind, Simplicity, and How to Improve Everyone’s Wellness

1. How to Synchronize Breath, Brain, and Mind

“The synchronization between respiration and slow neural activity is likely key to understanding the brain-physiology relationship…Slow rhythms thus provide a link and shared feature of respiration, neural, and mental activity serving as their ‘common currency.’”

- Goheen et al. (2023), Neuroscience Bulletin

Slow rhythms are the “common currency” of breath, brain, and mind. And since breath is the easiest one to slow on purpose, it’s the fastest way to calm the others. Breathe slowly, and the rest follows.

2. Why Breathing is a Most Important Part of Meditation

“So, the curious thing about breath is that it can be looked at both as a voluntary and an involuntary action. You can feel, on the one hand, ‘I am doing it,’ and, on the other hand, ‘it is happening to me.’ And that is why breathing is a most important part of meditation—because it is going to show you, as you become aware of your breath, that the hard and fast division that we make between ‘what we do’ on the one hand and ‘what happens to us’ on the other is arbitrary.”

– Alan Watts, Leave It Be
(transcribed from audio)

Another gem from Watts on how, with the proper framing, observing the breath becomes a gateway into a universal insight: “doing” and “being done to” are often indistinguishable.

3. How to Improve Everyone’s Well-Being

“These analyses demonstrated the potential therapeutic role of laughter-inducing interventions as a complementary strategy to improve everyone’s well-being and highlight the need for further research aiming to improve our collective sense of humor.”

- Kramer and Leitao (2023), PLOS One

I’ve shared this one before, but it’s worth revisiting: Across eight studies, they found that laughter reduced cortisol by 31.9%. So laugh more this week—and help someone else laugh too.

4. How to End Quarrels

“People forget that their lives will end soon. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.”

- The Buddha, The Dhammapada

Amazing how, when we reflect on how short life is, most of our conflicts start looking pretty insignificant. And the few that don’t are a gift, revealing what matters most to us.

"Life is sustained by breath. The moment we have that sense of shared breath, a sense of relationship to the world, we have spirituality."

— — Satish Kumar

Elegant Simplicity by Satish Kumar

Kumar once walked 8,000 miles with no money in his pocket for a cause he believed in…crazy. That ‘be the change’ pilgrimage spirit carries through to this book. He lays out how to simplify your life—not just materially, but also mentally and spiritually, too.

In good breath,

Nick Heath, T1D, PhD
“Breathing is the compound interest of health & wellness.”

P.S. “you looked stressed”

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