You can’t see your breathing, you can’t see your lungs, and the deep muscles involved don’t have a lot of nerve endings, so they’re hard to feel. Relearning how to breathe, then, is very different than any other type of learning you may have attempted. In addition, in order to make a change, your demanding and fussy brain needs to understand the why, the how, and the where, in order to dismantle your previously acquired cognitive bias (that is, your bad habits). Here’s what you can expect:
First, I’ll give you a detailed explanation of how you breathe. It may seem a simple explanation, but it is not a simple process at all. My overarching mission has been to present complex information in a way that is easily digestible and intuitively feels right.
Then you’ll get numbers and a grade, in order to know your baseline and be able to work from there. What this means is that you’ll get to give your own particular style of breathing a name and will be able to understand what you do and why, and how you got there.
Moving on, you’ll do a series of exercises until you find one that makes you go “Aha, I think I get it. This makes sense in a non-verbal way.” Maybe you’ll be lucky and there will be two or three exercises that feel oddly natural. You may have moments of it being so easy you wonder if you are in fact doing it correctly.
Then you’ll catch yourself doing it wrong, grimace, and start again.
But then the moments of “being right” will happen more often, or get easier. You’ll think you feel your body relax. You’ll wonder if you’re imagining it. (You won’t be.)
What will be happening is that you’ll be understanding:
• your breathing from multiple angles
• how your lifestyle has affected your breathing
• how to dismantle your bad habits
• how your health is being affected by bad breathing
• what to look for as you improve your breathing
It will be up to you to set up a workout, one that you do daily (maybe several times throughout the day). The pivotal part of success has to do with your assertively choosing a workout for yourself, noting your progress, and just as you would at the gym, adding a weight or a rep, once you’re ready.
Have a notepad next to you. Underline, highlight, write in the margins.
1. Grade yourself using the instructions that are detailed in chapter 2. Note your style of breathing and measure your Vital Lung Capacity. Use the baseline forms to log your symptoms at the start of this program and at the end of the fourteen days.
2. Make a workout for yourself exactly as you would with any exercise plan or weight-lifting routine at the gym. The baseline you have determined is the starting number. Make a commitment to focus on your lungs and breathing muscles every day for at least ten minutes. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing this to address stress, to get energized, or to get more oxygen to your muscles and organs so you can sleep better, heal faster, or perform better. What does matter is that you treat your workout like a regimen for fourteen days.
3. Determine your “max.” This may mean that you can do forty Exhale Pulsations before you can’t do any more. Or it may mean that you can do your breathing count for two minutes before you get jumbled up or distracted. That’s okay. As with any exercise, you need to know what your starting point and upper limits are and grow on that.
4. Don’t get thrown by the idea that this is “just breathing.” You’re working out very important muscles in your body that have probably been idle. Feeling tired is the result we’re looking for. You’re working internal muscles, and there will be a moment where you hit your “max.”
5. Treat the next fourteen days like a health commitment from which you cannot stray. Make adjustments in your life in order to be able to dedicate at least ten minutes a day to your workout. (While ten minutes is the minimum, if you’re motivated and would like to do fifteen, go ahead.) If you’d like to do ten minutes twice, or three times a day, do it!
At some point over the next two weeks, your body will “remember” what it has to do. You’ll notice that your brain feels less foggy, you’ll know how to unwind at the end of the day, and whatever hurts in your body will be alleviated. You may find in a few months that you need to reread parts of the book and take things up a notch, maybe do the harder exercises. You have more power over how you feel than you realize. Taking control of your breathing will prove that to you.
Once this sinks in, don’t resist the urge to “fix” your family and friends. Teaching someone else can help you gain even more mastery over this information.