Lars Christian Larssen teaches the physiological sigh: two quick inhales through your nose, then a long exhale through your mouth. It works because the extended exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system. Try it next time you're stuck waiting in line.
As a part of the human experience, it's clear that stress is inevitable. There's a bit of a common misconception that stress is actually bad for us. If you've seen my video on the relationship between stress and performance, you'll notice that actually we require stress to improve and adapt our ability to take action. It's what mobilizes our energy and it what gets us out of bed and arouses us so that we can actually go to work and do the things we need to do. However, over a long period of time, stress is chronic. Stress can become detrimental not only to our health, but also our performance. However, how often is it that you actually check in with yourself and notice how stressed you are? Using the human function curve in my previous video on stress and performance, you can have a look at the picture and subjectively choose where you are. And if you have signs of fatigue or signs of distress, then you can utilize tools to bring yourself back in again and use just ready rest. However, in this video, I wanted to talk something about the physiological sigh. Have you ever noticed that you do that when you get this kind of relief? Or if you notice something that is quite particularly stressful, but your innate thing is just to let it go, let go of that tension out of your body. In fact, Professor Andrew Huberman at Stanford University is doing some research on this and the impact that physiological size has on our arousal state and it has on our stress levels. And he suggests that actually we can use this as a conscious tool to bring down our stress levels. It works by twofold. Number one, in our lungs, we have small air sacs called alveoli, which is where gas exchange occurs. Over time, these air sacs actually can collapse and that can cause an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide that sticks in our lungs. And carbon dioxide can, over time, become a bit of a stress molecule and can cause us to feel a little bit anxious. So you might notice from time to time over the day, maybe five to 15 times an hour, that that there is a bit of a in your breathing that's natural. It's to be able to open up these alveoli, to be able to release that CO2 and get fresh oxygen into there. However, with the nature of a long sigh, a sigh and an exhale, it's a breath technique. It actually has a prolonged exhale. And we know when we exhale for longer that we're actually creating more parasympathetic nervous activity, which is our rest and digest system. So by using this as a tool, when we Consciously want to. We can bring stress down in the moment. So whilst this might not be a practice that you use in the long term, you might use more breath practices or non sleep deep rest protocols as a habitual thing to make sure that you're not chronically stressed. This is something that we can use in the moment and I'm going to talk you through how to do that just in a minute. Now imagine that you're at a shop and you're. Now you're in a bit of a rush, your parking tick is just about to run out, but you really want to grab something and at the queue you're waiting, you're two or three people behind and the person in front is just taken forever. Arguing the counter about a exchange they want to make. You notice yourself starting to get a little bit overwhelmed thinking you're gonna get a ticket on the car. You can feel this adrenaline burning up in your body. You feel yourself get intense and what can you do about it in a moment? Well, in fact, you can actually go to your breath and use a physiological sigh as a tool. The physiological sigh is a double inhale through the nose and, and a long exhale out through the mouth. So just like this. And by using an audible kind of letting go afterwards, you can even enhance the effect that it has on your body. So with me, let's have a practice now. Double inhale through the nose, long exhale out through the mouth. Do this four or five times, let go of tension in the shoulders. And just notice how you feel. Now, if you were wearing a heart rate monitor, your heart rate would just gradually start to drop. As you offload some of that CO2, you may feel yourself a bit more grounded back into your body again. So the physiological psi is whilst it's an unconscious, innate process that helps us stay alive through expanding our lungs, it's also a conscious tool that you can use in real time to bring down your stress levels and to ensure over time, your chronic stress does not get too high and you can choose to respond in the moment rather than being reactive. Next time you're at a shop in a queue, you find yourself getting wound up or you're at work and someone is talking to you in a particular way rather than reacting, go to your breath and use a sigh. If you took away some value from this video, like subscribe, leave a comment below if you have any questions about how this works and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for tuning in.
Unlock Nervous System Regulation: Master Signal-to-Noise Ratio for Calm & Clarity
