Most people breathe shallowly, using only half their lung capacity, which forces the heart to beat twice as fast. This extra cardiac load is especially risky for people with heart disease, high blood pressure, or sleep apnea. Small improvements in breathing depth can yield dramatic health gains.
Chapters
When we look at breathing and breathwork, people are like, Michael, come on, I breathe naturally all day long. There are certain breathing techniques that can help relax you, and then there are opposite breathing techniques that can elevate your energy. We can use breath as one of the fundamental guides for our sympathetic and our parasympathetic nervous system, which becomes again how we function throughout the day. So when we look at how are people breathing, we could actually say that most people are what we call shallow breathers. So they're just, Using about half of their lung. When you do that, you actually force your heart to beat twice as fast. So by not having an extended breath, you're actually putting a greater load on your heart. And for folks out there who have heart disease, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, things like that, it's not a great idea to do that. So all of these things are things that we think we're doing okay, but unfortunately, we might be able to just level them up a little bit better and the results become exponential.
