Aaron Hartman, MDFunctional Medicine Specialist | Clinical Researcher

Dr Song | Unlock the Power of Breath to Calm Your Body

4 Jan 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:50

A short spoken segment (YouTube video) by Dr. Song explaining that slow, diaphragmatic breathing engages the vagus nerve and reduces the physiological stress response. He describes practical breathing cues (fill the belly/diaphragm, avoid shoulder breathing, inhale then exhale fully) and highlights measurable effects such as slowed heart rate and normalized pupil size; he emphasizes the technique is free, simple, and usable by children anytime.

Chapters

Our breath is the one thing that if we can control our breath and slow it down, fill our belly up, our diaphragm up fully, you know, with. With air as we inhale and then exhale slowly, fully deflating our lungs and not breathing with our shoulders, that slowing your breath will then engage your vagus nerve, which will then slow down your heart rate, get your pupils to normalize in size, actually change the way that the hairs on your ear are kind of pointed, because we become much more attuned to sounds, you know, when we're in that fight or flight state. Right. We need to know, is there Is there danger lurking behind me? And so just by slowing our breath down, we can stop that physiologic stress response. And so, you know, that is the one thing that kids can do anywhere, anytime, for free.