In this 30‑day Healthy Habits Challenge video, Cheryl McColgan – founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow and a veteran yoga teacher – introduces a simple three‑breath reset to help manage stress and impulsive reactions. She explains that the key to the practice is a slightly longer exhale than inhale (e.g., inhale for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 5), which activates the parasympathetic nervous system and promotes calm. Cheryl outlines practical ways to embed the reset into daily life, such as using it as a trigger during tense moments, habit‑stacking it with existing routines, or adding it to a bedtime ritual. She notes that scientific research supporting the technique is available through the challenge’s tracker and email links, and encourages viewers to incorporate the practice throughout the day to improve emotional regulation.
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I'm Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, and welcome to day 10 of the 30-day Healthy Habits Challenge. So today is going to be a habit that I have been practicing for a really long time because it's a little bit based in yoga, which if you know a little bit about my background, I'm a certified experienced yoga teacher, tons of hours teaching, have been doing yoga since, gosh, this is tough to say, but like over 30 years now. I picked it up while I was in college. But anyway, it's about a breathing practice. And this one's not a structured breathing practice. This is just to try this one time today. And that's just to practice a 3-breath reset. So at some point during the day where you're either tired or feeling a little stressed, or you're having an interaction that is making you tense up, you're simply going to take 3 deep breaths. Now, the one thing I want to teach you about this, because there are a lot of structured breathing programs and they all have maybe slightly different purposes. There's box breathing, there's alternate nostril breathing, there's a ton of different breathing practices, and we are gonna talk about another one, I think later in the series, uh, that's for a different purpose. But really this is just a practice to just get you thinking about breathing. And the thing I just wanna bring home is that the most, one of the more important parts of any breath practice, I think if you're using it to calm down or to fight stress, which is what we're trying to do with this one, and that is to extend the exhale slightly longer than the inhale. So if you inhale for a count of 4 for example, you wanna exhale for at least a count of 5. And the reason that this works, and there's plenty of data on it, like I, you know, this whole challenge, there's always research and the links for those are in your tracker and the emails, but the slightly longer exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system. And that's the part of your nervous system that's for calm, that's for rest and digest. And it's the one that a lot of people really have trouble accessing. So just having that slightly longer exhale is a great way to do that. So today, like I said, one of those times you're just going to do that slightly longer exhale. This is gonna cue your nervous system to be more calm, and it's gonna help with stress and impulsive decisions. So it's particularly useful in situations, maybe with your significant other or at work or with your children. Anytime you're feeling a little frustrating, just take a moment, 3 deep breaths, slightly longer exhale, and then deal with whatever the situation is. So you might wanna use some kind of trigger moment today that makes you think of it. Like again, if we do this habit stacking thing, the thing that's gonna help you do it most easily. Now that's most useful when you, it's something that you wanna accomplish every single day. And I certainly think taking this time, any time of day, doing it a specific time is really good. But I think it's really more useful even, like I said, in those little situations where you might have some stress, like before a meeting or when you're driving in traffic or something like that, or just using it to really settle yourself down before bed. You could make it part of your, uh, you know, bedtime ritual if you wanted to do that. So that's today's thing. Super easy. Just breathe. If you wanna read the science, make sure you're signed up for the challenge. You'll get all the links in the tracker and in the emails. And that's it for today. I will see you again tomorrow. I was almost gonna say next week, but man, we're only on day 10 here, so we got a lot to go.
