Five Minutes, How to Heal the Mind, and 15 versus 300

4 THOUGHTS

1. The Entire Purpose of the Human Brain

“The entire purpose of the human brain is to produce movement. Movement is the only way we have of interacting with the world.”
– Daniel Wolpert, Ph.D., from The Joy of Movement

And the most fundamental movement the brain produces to interact with the world? The movement of air—our breathing 😊

2. Five Minutes for Meaningful Change

“The lack of significant association between effectiveness and session durations >= 5 min indicates that any session duration beyond 5 min can be effective…simply engaging in a breathing practice provides benefits, with sessions as short as 5 min yielding comparable benefits to longer sessions.”
– Bentley et al. (2023), Brain Sciences

This was the most surprising yet welcome result of this excellent paper: We only need five minutes of slow breathing practice to see significant improvements in stress and anxiety.

Of course, longer sessions can have different benefits. But if our goal is lowering stress (or we’re short on time), we can be pretty confident that even five minutes will make a meaningful difference in our day 🙏

3. It Isn’t Really a Wonder

“There are quite a few validated, scientific findings that suggest that controlled breathing has a wide range of beneficial effects…This makes a lot of sense…it isn’t really a wonder that the thing that keeps us alive also impacts how we experience life.”
- Eddie Stern, Healing Through Breathing

“It isn’t really a wonder that the thing that keeps us alive also impacts how we experience life.” That’s so good, so obvious, and so logical, which is why it’s so easy to overlook 👏

4. A House a Home, a Cup a Drink

Like how the space inside a house makes it a home, or the emptiness within a cup makes it useful for drinking, it is the breath inside the body that makes it so remarkable for living.

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