Patrick McKeown explains how Ujjayi breathing, a yoga technique with slight throat restriction, triggers relaxation through slow exhalation. Fast exhalations stress your body; slow ones activate your parasympathetic nervous system. Reducing breath volume raises CO2 levels, stimulating the vagus nerve and helping you fall asleep faster.
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I've also talked about the Ujjayi breath and I think I taught it in the sleep challenge, or at least it's one of the free giveaways from something which is a way to rapidly fall asleep. This is something I learned in yoga. Can you talk about the Ujjayi breath and what that does versus all the other ones that you're going to teach us here in a minute?
Yeah, I suppose like with Ujjayi breath, where there's a restriction now I don't teach it myself, there's restriction of the throat. We have to ask the question, what's the volume or the tidal volume that's. That's taking part there? I think it's going to vary according to the instructor. You could have one instructor who's taken quite full of breaths and even though there's restriction of the throat and you can hear quite a. Quite an amount of noise from the sound of breathing, but you might have another instructor who's taking very light breaths. So the tidal volume is going to be different. And if we think of. If you want to, you know, influence the autonomic nervous system, it's all in the exhalation. If we have a fast and sharp exhalation, we activate a stress response, and if we have a slow and prolonged exhalation, we activate the body's relaxation response. So I'm not sure if I'd be doing fast, rapid breathing before going to sleep. I'd be doing the opposite. I'd be downregulating with a very soft breath in through the nose and a really relaxed and slow breath out. Unless what's happening with the U GI Breath is that the tide of the respiratory rate is quicker, or it may not be, but the tidal volume is, is smaller, is shorter, and as a result, minute ventilation is reduced. The person is breathing less air and that's going to stimulate the vagus nerve, the increased carbon dioxide. So if you feel their hunger, I think that's it. If you feel the air hunger during it, it stimulates the vagus nerve. And by doing that, then it's going to bring the body into relaxation and.
