The Stress Prescription

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Feeling Better, Thoughts, and the Most Reliable Rhythm in Our Lives

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Reading Time: 2 min 5 sec

I hope the next 25’ish breaths are the most nourishing of your day.

4 THOUGHTS

1. Feeling Better, in Both Mind and Body

“One of the essential techniques that I distill from this body of knowledge about pranayama is that the qualities of breath that you want to develop are to make it deeper, slower, quieter, and more regular.”

– Andrew Weil, MD, Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing

Dr. Weil goes on to say: “When your breathing is deeper, slower, quieter, and more regular, you are feeling better, in both mind and body. Your nervous system is functioning more smoothly, and all your organs are operating more harmoniously as a result.”

Sounds like a good deal to me 🙏

2. Thoughts Don’t Matter

“Thoughts are just thoughts, just mental sounds…you'll never, ever succeed in blocking out the thoughts. No one does: not the Buddha, not the Dalai Lama, not the Zen or yoga teacher who looks so peaceful. What they have succeeded in doing is giving up trying: they’ve succeeded in noticing that thoughts don’t matter.”

- Dean Sluyter, Natural Meditation

I love that perspective. It reminds me of what my good friend Eddie Stern is fond of saying: our mind thinks thoughts just like our heart beats. We don’t try to stop our heart from beating, so let’s not try to stop our mind from thinking.

A better approach? Give up trying and realize that “thoughts don’t matter.” 👏

3. Moving for Mindfulness

Three quotes to ponder:

“We need to move to be still, and only from that place of stillness can we move well.” - Caroline Williams

“Without a balance between physical activity and meditation, for instance, we may become irritable or restless. Exercise can help to solve some of the problems that come as you descend in consciousness.” - Eknath Easwaran

“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.

4. Ocean Breathing

“Many people also resonate with the soothing sound of rhythmic ocean waves—it affects our breathing, slowing it down and encouraging deeper breaths than the shallow and insufficiently oxygenated breathing that is our habit.”

- Elissa Epel, Ph.D., The Stress Prescription

One way to take advantage of this is to listen to the sound of water during your breathing or meditation practice. It’s a simple & effective way to combine your breath with the sound of water, which will naturally make it deeper, slower, quieter, and more regular 🌊

1 Quote

“Our breath, like our heartbeat, is the most reliable rhythm in our lives. When we become attuned to this constant rhythm, our breath can gradually teach us to come back to the original silence of the mind.””
— Donna Farhi

Thanks to Daniella DeVarney at Our Breath Collective for sharing this one with me 🙏

1 GOOD BOOK

The Stress Prescription by Elissa Epel, Ph.D.

This is an excellent book if you’re dealing with stress and uncertainty—who isn’t? It’s filled with several great breathing gems and other simple practices for, as the subtitle says, “more joy and ease.”

In good breath,

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

Enjoy these posts? Donate to say thanks!



P.S. a modern-day hero



Get One of My New Digital Guidebooks


The Breathing App for Diabetes

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Amazon Associate Disclosure

I’ve been recommending books for almost 6 years. Yet somehow, I just discovered that I could be an Amazon affiliate [face-palm]. In any case better late than never. Now, any Amazon link you click is an affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. So, if you’d like to support my work, buying books through these links is helpful : )

* An asterisk by a quote indicates that I listened to this book on Audible. Therefore, the quotation might not be correct, but is my best attempt at reproducing the punctuation based on the narrator’s pace, tone, and pauses.

 
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One Solution to Stress, Getting More, and the Best $0.99 I’ve Spent

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Listen Instead of Reading

If you enjoy listening, you can subscribe to the audio version on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Audible so you don’t even have to look at the email 😊

Reading Time: 2 min 12 sec

I hope the next 33ish breaths are the most nourishing of your day.


4 THOUGHTS

1. The Most Ubiquitous Form of Stress (and one solution to it)

“Our bodies get worn down more quickly under chronic stress, and chronic uncertainty is the most ubiquitous form of chronic stress.”

- Elissa Epel, Ph.D., The Stress Prescription

Our greatest, “most ubiquitous form of chronic stress” is uncertainty. (This statement holds up in my life. It’s mind-blowingly obvious, yet I’ve never realized it.)

One of Dr. Epel’s Solutions: Accept and embrace uncertainty as an unavoidable part of life. Easy to say, harder to do.

My Way of Doing It: Practice mindfulness of breathing, learning to cultivate an attitude of nonjudgmental acceptance as you receive each breath exactly as it is. This mindset will transfer to your perspective off the cushion, too.

2. A Simple Way for Getting More Out of Your Practice

Before you start:

“Take a moment to reflect on your motivation, making sure that the wish to practice for the benefit of all beings is present in the mind.”

- Anyen Rinpoche & Allison Choying Zangmo, The Tibetan Yoga of Breath

It only takes 5-10 seconds, and you can adopt this beautiful mindset for any wellness practice you do 👏

3. Mindfulness is Contagious (you can make others healthier)

“As more than forty years of research has shown, mindfulness is good for our health. The research on mindful contagion suggests that one person’s mindfulness may increase another person’s mindfulness. Thus, I think it may be the case that the people around us with whom we interact may actually be having a positive effect on our health.”

- Ellen Langer, Ph.D., The Mindful Body

✅ Mindfulness is good for our health.

✅ Our mindfulness can increase another person’s mindfulness.

Thus, deductive logic tells us that, by practicing mindfulness, we may be able to positively impact the health of those around us 🙏

4. Becoming Your Own Island

“You don’t need a course in silence or relaxation to be able simply to pause. Silence can be anywhere, anytime—it’s just in front of your nose.”

- Erling Kagge, Silence

That’s amazing by itself, but it got even better. Kagge went on to say, “Sure, we are all part of the same continent, but the potential wealth of being an island for yourself is something you carry around with you all the time.”

“An island for yourself” <– That’s so good 👏

Here’s to using our breath to create our own island of silence, today.

BONUS: The Best $0.99 cents I’ve Spent

This gentle, fade-in alarm clock: Progressive Alarm Clock (this is iPhone specific, but it looks like Android has other good options).

P.S. I just Googled “gentle alarm clock” and found this one. Perhaps there are better ones out there, but this does the trick for me.

1 Quote

“I recommend breathwork to almost all patients that I see because, in my experience, stress is a primary cause (or an aggravating cause) of most cases of illness. And even if people have diseases that clearly have organic physical causes, relaxation can nonetheless benefit them and help their body’s healing system work better.””
— Andrew Weil, MD

1 Answer

Category: Respiratory Tract

Answer: The upper & lower respiratory tracts are lined with this, which can trap small particles, thus helping to filter incoming air.

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(Cue the Jeopardy! music.)

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Question: What is a mucous membrane?


3 Spots Left

I have 3 spots left in October for my 8-week program for overcoming stressful life setbacks. Email nick@thebreathingdiabetic.com with subject line “breath” to learn more.

In good breath,

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


P.S. achieved full enlightenment

iCalm for Focused Relaxation

If you haven’t already, try iCalm. They called it “meditation in a bottle”…I gave in and bought…and now I use it almost daily, lol. Use discount code NICK20 for 20% off.

* An asterisk by a quote indicates that I listened to this book on Audible. Therefore, the quotation might not be correct, but is my best attempt at reproducing the punctuation based on the narrator’s pace, tone, and pauses.

 
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Breath Learning, More Joy, and How to Change Our Reality

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Listen Instead of Reading

If you enjoy listening, you can subscribe to the audio version on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Audible so you don’t even have to look at the email 😊

4 THOUGHTS


1. Introducing…

www.breathlearning.com

Now open. Check it out.

2. Seeing More Joy

Doing a deliberate slow nasal breathing practice first thing every morning is like putting on joy contacts to start your day.

3. A Good Case for Doing Your Practice in the Morning

“We each have our unique starting baseline—the level of stress arousal that we usually hover around through any typical day … Regardless of where we start from, the lower we can get our baseline stress arousal, the better—it means we’ll be much more able to tolerate the peaks of stressful events.”

- Elissa Epel, Ph.D., The Stress Prescription

To me, this passage presents a good case for doing our slow breathing (or whichever practice you do) first thing in the morning. By starting at a lower baseline, we’ll tolerate the day’s stressors better 👏

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P.S. And if you choose slow nasal breathing, you’ll get the added bonus of seeing more joy 😊 (see Thought #2).

4. The Power of Breath Awareness

Dr. Amishi Jha discussing breath awareness in Peak Mind:

“[W]e use the breath for a couple of important reasons: It anchors us in the body. It allows us to experience the body sensations that are unfolding in real time as we breathe, in the here and now. … And finally, our breath is always with us. It’s the most natural built-in target for our attention that we can always return to.”

Put simply: The breath is the best way to be present with what is happening now.

1 Quote

“The first step in changing reality is to recognize it as it is now.””
— David Reynolds

1 Answer

Category: A Funny Breathing Exercise

Answer: This breathing exercise causes the abdomen, chest, and diaphragm to tighten while also expanding alveoli, all of which may improve lung function.

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(Cue the Jeopardy! music.)

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Question: What is laughing?

In good breath,

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


P.S. I need to adopt this practice

* An asterisk by a quote indicates that I listened to this book on Audible. Therefore, the quotation might not be correct, but is my best attempt at reproducing the punctuation based on the narrator’s pace, tone, and pauses.