Fleet MaullThe Entrepreneur’s Zen Master

💨 “Your breath is the remote control for your nervous system.” @SOMABreath

14 Jul 2025 · 1 min

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Fleet Maull explains how breathing controls your nervous system: inhaling raises heart rate and activates your sympathetic response, while exhaling lowers it and triggers parasympathetic calm. Extended exhalation is calming; hyperventilation can actually reduce oxygen to your tissues.

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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. So when you breathe in, your sympathetic switches on. When you breathe out, your parasympathetic switches on. And this creates what we call, like, coherence or heart rate variability and things like that, which you can actually tune. What it does is it turns on the parasympathetic. Over time, you'll feel very relaxed and sleepy. Now, if you breathe more with 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. If you hyperventilate, which a holotropic is, for example, doing you actually lower oxygenation of your body tissue cells, especially your brain. And dmt, our own version of dmt, plays a role in stabilizing oxygen levels in hypoxias.