Robert Whitfield MDAmerica's Breast Implant Illness Expert™

Resonant Breathing: Stress Relief & Self-Care Techniques

18 Jun 2025 · 2 min

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1:52

Robert Whitfield MD emphasizes the importance of self-care and teaches "resonant breathing" as a practical way to reduce stress and help recovery. He distinguishes resonant breathing from more intensive "breath work," warns that breath work can be unsafe after surgery (risking hypoxia), and offers simple instructions: breathe through the nose, out through the mouth, using a count of five for a few minutes in the evening (to help sleep) and again before getting out of bed in the morning. He notes practical constraints (doesn't practice with CPAP) and comments on the need for more self-work, especially among women balancing household and job responsibilities.

Questions this video answers

June 18, 2025.

A count of five (inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth) for a few minutes.

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.