Robert Whitfield MDAmerica's Breast Implant Illness Expert™

Resonant Breathing: Stress Relief & Self-Care Techniques

5 Jul 2025 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:52

A short clinical monologue by Robert Whitfield MD advising patients on self-care and stress-relief using "resonant breathing" (belly breathing). He contrasts quick-fix expectations with the need for ongoing self-work, gives practical breathing instructions for evening and morning routines, and warns against certain populations and contexts (e.g., post-surgery, when using CPAP).

Questions this video answers

A count of five (breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth, repeated for a few minutes).

After surgery — he warns breath work can cause hypoxia post-surgery.

Chapters

People don't do enough self work. They kind of expect this to do the work for them. Not a quick fix, but kind of a quick fix. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I probably spend a lot more talk time talking about getting yourself into a parasympathetic state and concentrating on things like resonant breathing, not breath work. I don't want anybody. So this is not good after surgery. Breath work is not something you should be engaging in after surgery because it can make you hypoxic by breathing rapidly. So I concentrate and try to help my patients concentrate on what's term resonant breathing. So, you know, just getting yourself into like belly breathing, like a baby. So that lowers your. We'll just say your stress state. And the easy way to do it is when you're in bed in the evening and you're trying to get to sleep is you can concentrate on breathing through your nose, out through your mouth and do a count of five and do that for a few minutes. And we all could probably do a better job doing this, but I don't do it with my CPAP on. That's a little challenging. And then before you get out of bed in the morning, you can also do the same thing so that you have to take time for yourself. And I think the women in, in my experience, they're working so hard to take care of the family and the. They're running the household and jobs and, you know, not doing good enough jobs, taking care of themselves. So I have to have this kind of conversation where there's a lot of self work that's not happening that needs to happen in order for people to get well.