Niraj Naik explains how breathing patterns control your nervous system: long exhales calm you down, fast breathing activates stress, and breath-holds around 60 to 90 seconds trigger adaptive responses like increased red blood cells. He claims prolonged rhythmic breathing can stimulate endogenous DMT and produce psychedelic-like states.
Questions this video answers
Cambridge University (referred to in the transcript as 'we did a study with Cambridge').
Around 60 to 90 seconds (the speaker says 'around 60 to 90 seconds. Breath hold time and more').
Examples mentioned: 'in the 50s' and 'over a hundred' (speaker and interviewer refer to heart rate falling into the 50s and rising over 100).
Chapters
What I'm going to do is I'm going to lower it down for, to about 15, 20 beats a minute lower and I'm going to raise it up, hope I can stay in focus. It. See that? Yeah.
All the way down into the 50s.
50 and I send it up. Ready? See that? Yeah.
Over a hundred.
It looked like I was doing anything. Yeah.
So tell us what you're doing with your breath.
Looks like magic, right?
Yeah. You weren't doing anything obvious externally with the breath, but you must have been doing something with your breath, I assume.
Yeah, exactly. So here's a simple thing to understand. When you breathe in, your heart rate goes up a bit. When you breathe out, your heart rate goes down a bit. Right. So when you breathe in, your sympathetic switches on. When you breathe out, your parasympathetic switches on. So your breath is always changing the nervous system slightly. And this creates what we call like coherence or heart rate variability and things like that, which you can actually tune. So certain breathing techniques involve extending the exhalation. So if you breathe slowly with an extended exhalation, right. What it does is it turns on the parasympathetic. Right. Over time you'll feel very relaxed and sleepy. That can help you get into more restful states. Now if you breathe more with a, like a more intense inhale and just let go on the exhale, so your inhale is more forceful, what will happen is you'll turn on the sympathetic. Okay. Your heart rate will probably go up. Okay. So some more faster breathing techniques, especially with an intense inhale. Right. Will turn on the sympathetic nervous system and that will actually also create another state. So with this pulse oxy, you can measure the oxygen levels of your bloodstream. If you hyperventilate, which a holotropic is, for example, doing you actually lower oxygenation of your body tissue cells, especially your brain. And what you do is you kind of break up the connection of the unconscious mind with the conscious mind. Right. So we did a study with Cambridge that went and showed this in depth and it can actually create a psychedelic like effect. Also rhythmic breathing from the lungs like this, if it's slow rhythmic breathing, it wakes up oxytocin. If it's quite fast, rapid rhythmic breathing or just breathe like hyperventilation. Okay. Any actually rhythmic breathing technique for a long enough period of time will generate DMT from the lungs. You have this own endogenous version of DMT that is often produced in the lungs. Okay. In certain conditions. And dmt, our own version of DMT plays A role in stabilizing oxygen levels in hypoxia. So when oxygen levels are low, so hyperventilation, like for long periods of time, it creates a state called respiratory alkalosis that lowers oxygenation of your body tissue cells. And you'll feel very lightheaded and dizzy, but it will also wake up this endogenous dmt and it can invoke like a near death experience on command. That's kind of like how holotropic works. Takes you back into the moment you're born. Actually it's wild how it works holotropic, but this is like doing a massive dose of psilocybin or shrooms in one go, which you're not going to do every day. Okay, you might do it one offs. So they're more like ceremonial experiences. They should be treated like doing psychedelics because the feeling and the effects of it are very similar. Again, we did a study with Cambridge University that showed this in one of our more advanced protocols where we do more faster breathing techniques. But the other thing with the breath is when you hold your breath for long periods of time. So our protocol, our main core method involves slow rhythmic breathing, right, with extended breath holds on the exhale and on the inhale. And what this does is it lowers the oxygen levels in your blood for a brief period and around 60 to 90 seconds. Breath hold time and more. And you know it goes deeper the longer you hold it. You create state called intermittent hypoxia. And intermittent hypoxia is a positive stress on the body. Your body thinks it's running out of oxygen, so it adapts to a low oxygen environment. So you produce more red blood cells. You get more blood vessels forming around your body, especially in your heart and your brain. You even wake up dormant parts of the brain that doesn't have much blood flow. Blood flow goes rapidly to all areas of the body because it feels like you're running out of oxygen. So it does what it can to get the oxygen everywhere, right? And it has this strengthening effect on your physiology. And also what wakes up is stem cells out of circulation and the feeling. So stem cells actually just going on to that have the ability to turn into any other cell in the body. So very small, like stem cells get awakened, they come out of the lower oxygen areas in the body and go to areas that need healing, right? And that can lead to lower inflammation, rapid healing, self healing experiences. So.
