[00:00] So you're stress eating, you're snapping at your kids, you're doom scrolling, your stress levels have gone through the roof. I get it. I've got a great study for you.
[00:12] It's a 2023 study in Cell Reports Medicine. It looked at 108 adults, and there is one specific type of breathing technique you can do to stop that stress response immediately on the moment that it hits you.
[00:32] So in this video, I want to show you how to do this breathing technique, and I want to run some scenarios of where you might apply it throughout your day.
[00:45] The study showed it was a 30-second breathing technique, but done consistently over five minutes. And I'll show you, we'll talk about the variety here. It can absolutely change a stress response and put you back into a state of calm.
[01:04] So this, I hear so many of you frustrated with things like your belly fat, which is cortisol-laden, insomnia which is also cortisol's problem cortisol's fault weight loss resistance cortisol's
[01:20] fault menopause symptoms all because of too strong of a stress response and this one breathing technique can absolutely change this so let's learn this technique first those of you who've
[01:34] been around for a while hopefully you know i have a new tool for you it is free it's called a nervous system questionnaire. The link is below to help you assess where your stress is at. What this
[01:46] study showed is that when we are breathing, there is one part of the breath that acts like a brake pedal to stress. And it is the exhale. Think about it. You're at your desk and you're like on the
[02:03] computer and you're like, oh God, this isn't working and this isn't working. What do we do? Immediately, what do we do? We sigh. We go, oh, that's because the exhale is the brake on a stress response.
[02:19] Like, I really want you to take that in. You can exhale right now. Like, when it hits you, they call it cyclic sighing, where all of a sudden a stress hits you,
[02:32] you start to take a deep breath in because you're reacting to what the stress response is but then that long exhale starts to engage a specific nerve in your body called the vagus nerve
[02:48] and the vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body and it coordinates your parasympathetic nervous system. Your parasympathetic nervous system is the system that starts to bring you
[03:02] out of fight or flight. Now, the exhale, being the brake pedal, can be put into a formula that this study showed called cyclic sighing. So, there's regular sighing where you're just like,
[03:17] and then there's cyclic sighing. That's hard to say. So, you go two inhales through the nose, And then one exhale out through the mouth.
[03:29] So do it with me right now. It's like... Do that while I continue on and tell me how you feel with this type of sighing.
[03:42] What you are doing is you are telling your body to move out of fight or flight and move into a parasympathetic state. And you can do it. You don't have to do it as exaggerated as I did it, but you could do it in a board meeting.
[03:58] You can do it when your teenager is barking at you. You can do it when you look at your bank account. You can do it anywhere. The second thing that this study found is that all kinds of breathing, all kinds, it doesn't have to be this two in and one out,
[04:15] But as long as the exhale is longer than the inhale, that it improved mood better than meditation. So, I don't know, you tell me in the comments.
[04:29] You know, when I'm having an acute stress response, the last thing I'm going to do is sit down and meditate because my monkey mind is going crazy. And what this study found is that meditation will help you observe the stress response, but changing the style of breathing that you are engaging in actually alters the body's natural stress response directly.
[04:59] It's not going through the mind. It's going through the body. And if you've done any research recently on the body keeps the score, it's all of the trauma that we've been building up, all of the stress that has been happening to us is in the body.
[05:16] And the body is telling the mind to look out to be fearful to be in fight or flight So what this study showed was by doing these breathing activities what happening is we actually changing it at the body level which in an acute response meditation can
[05:37] exactly do for you because it's really focused on the mind. The other interesting part of this study is that it showed that regulating your nervous system with breath work is like training a muscle
[05:50] and that the effects will build up over time. So if you start to do this, let's say you get off this video right now and all of a sudden something stressful happens to you
[06:02] and you do the cyclic sighing, you might be like, well, that didn't work. But it's repetition. You are training your nervous system. So you're going to train your nervous system over time to receive a stressor
[06:17] and then you're going to give it a really good positive body response. Regulation is like training a muscle. Each repetition makes that path from trigger to calm a more automated response.
[06:34] This is really important when we're trying to keep our nervous systems balanced. The mistakes people make when they have a lot of stress is that they go to the mind first. They need a new tool for the
[06:48] mind. I'm going to ask you to re-pattern this. Go to the body first. This is why I like this cyclic sign. I like walking. I like legs up the wall. Whatever is going to move from the body,
[07:05] so the stress from the body will make a bigger difference on your mind. If you want to know more about that, I put the link below in the notes of my interview with Frank Anderson,
[07:17] who is a trauma specialist who has studied under Bessel van der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score. It's a phenomenal interview. So if you want to know how to go to the body for stress, go check that interview out. Track number two that a lot of people do, and I've fallen into this,
[07:34] is that you white knuckle it. That it's like, oh, this happened and this happened and this happened and you don't use a response at all. And you just think, I just got to get through this moment
[07:48] and then another moment hits and then another moment hits. I do not want you to white knuckle it. I want you to train your nervous system how to have a proper stress response.
[08:03] And then the third thing that a lot of people do is they look for stress trackers. I'm really curious if you all have done this, but a lot of us have gotten really obsessed with heart rate variability.
[08:16] And I'll never forget when I started getting the different monitors, the rings, and the bands, and all I could see was my heart rate variability going down, and that was stressing me out more.
[08:28] So you don't need a stress tracker. One of the greatest ways to know if your stress response is improving is by having a different stress response the next time it hits you.
[08:42] I can tell you as somebody who's been really working on her nervous system over the last couple of years, I'm blown away when a stress response hits me and I don't have that acute response.
[08:56] And that alone tells me that I'm improving. Here are your five steps that you can do immediately to start to change this pattern and use this breath technique. Step number one, the next stressor that hits you, I want you to stop and notice that it hit you.
[09:15] And here's what I want you to do. I don't want you to notice in your brain. I want you to notice in your body. So I want you to notice, whoa, my chest is tight. I'm clenching my jaw.
[09:27] I'm breathing up high, my heart is racing, I want you to see the body response. Because if you understand the body response, you'll recognize it next time. Sometimes stress is sneaky,
[09:43] and we are up here trying to solve the problem, and we are completely disconnected from our body. I want to bring you back into your body when a stress response hits, so you know how to read
[09:57] its cues. So step number one is you're going to stop and notice. Step number two, you're going to do this 30 second breath routine. So you're going to do two nose inhales and one long at mouth
[10:15] exhale. So and sometimes people, breath experts will say you can do one big inhale and take a little sip at the top, like, and then, but in that moment, once you notice my body's tightening,
[10:33] you're going to do this inhale with a long exhale, and you're going to do one to three rounds, somewhere between 15 to 30 seconds So you go as long as you need to go but keep doing it and I want you to see how you start to feel different in your body So a couple of examples of this because this isn just when you had bad news hit you
[11:02] This can be when you're looking at the refrigerator and you're like, oh, okay, I want to eat all the bad things, and I know I shouldn't eat the bad things. Do one of these cyclic sighs. Or somebody texts you,
[11:15] and you want to immediately text them back and you're angry about it. Why don't you notice, pause, notice where it is in your body, and then I want you to do a couple of rounds of a cyclic sigh.
[11:27] Or maybe before, you know, you have to have a hard conversation with somebody. Or those of you, I know I do this sometimes before I go on stage to speak, is the cyclic sigh is your moment to come back to regulation, and it only takes 30 seconds.
[11:45] 3 a.m. in the morning, try it then and see what happens. Now, the key I want to point out is the long exhale because that stimulates the vagus nerve.
[11:59] Step number three, you've identified it in your body. You've done the actual breathing technique. Now, what I want you to do is to orient yourself to the present moment
[12:13] because what happens a lot is we got bad news a couple of minutes ago and I heard something recently that like emotions are only felt for 90 seconds you feel something that makes you sad
[12:28] the emotion is actually only there for 90 seconds and then it goes away do you know why it keeps healed doesn't feel like that because we ruminate on it over and over and over again and we reactivate
[12:42] that old emotion. So you've done, you've paused, you've done the breathing technique. Now orient yourself to something in the present moment that is unrelated to what the stressor was.
[12:58] So let's use fasting as an example. You're in the 14 hours into a fast, you're hungry, you're looking at the refrigerator, you're frustrated because you're like, I just want to eat, you do your cyclic sigh, then I want you to go out into your backyard and look at something
[13:14] beautiful and see a plant that's beautiful or go out for a walk, but you're going to reorient yourself to something that is different than what was that stress response. If you're at work,
[13:28] think, you know, can you, you know, go to YouTube and look up some babbling brook. There's so many like beautiful videos on YouTube here that show all these different nature scenes. You could go
[13:41] and look at your favorite nature scene, but you got to change what you are focused on. That's step number three. Interesting study on changing your focus. This was a study in social cognitive and
[13:56] effective neuroscience that showed actively redirecting a food craving, like redirecting it. I want chocolate. Okay, wait. Oh, look how pretty my plants are. Just that redirection actually
[14:13] lowered the reward response to the food you were going to eat. So if you want to eat the chocolate cake and you're like, I want to eat that, but wait, I'm going to come over here and
[14:26] look at something different. And then you go back to the chocolate cake and you do that many different times. When you eat that chocolate cake, it's going to have less of a dopamine response.
[14:39] There is power in the pause. There is power in the redirection. That's what this study was showing, that cravings run through a reward and sensory
[14:51] circuit and shifting your attention of what you're looking at will actually change how much dopamine you get from that food, which is incredible. Step number four is you're going to decide
[15:06] now that you've calmed yourself, now that you're feeling you've redirected what you are looking at, you can come back to the stress and you can decide how you're going to react.
[15:21] And in this one, what I want to say is decide who you want to be. I can tell you as somebody who has received a lot of bullying comments on social media,
[15:35] I feel sad for those people. I'm like, is that who you want to be? Somebody who's constantly criticizing other people? But sometimes when we're in the acute stress response, we don't have that.
[15:50] We're not using our frontal lobe to make a smart decision. We're locked in our amygdala. But step number four is revisit this stressor and decide who you want to be.
[16:02] Do you want to be somebody who is angry all the time? Do you want to be somebody who criticizes people all the time? Is that who you want to show up as a human? Or do you want to be somebody who can pause regulate themselves and have a better discussion around what that stress response is And it really quite up to you I not here to tell you who to be
[16:25] I can tell you I saw something during the pandemic that really kept my focus. It was a statement that said, I can't wait to see who I'm going to be on the other side of the pandemic.
[16:41] And I loved that idea because I thought, wow, during the pandemic, I'm going to learn a lot of resilience. And I'm very curious who the person on the other side of that, who she's going to be, who understands resilience.
[16:57] You get to choose your actions. And science, I just want to remind you, when we're putting this system together for your stress response, science shows one time isn't always good enough.
[17:10] that it's the consistency that beats the intensity. So learning how to retrain your nervous system to respond differently is going to be the key here. Step number five is you want to start to build a dedicated stress response ritual.
[17:29] I recommend three times a week for 20 to 30 minutes in a quiet space, you practice this breathing technique without the stress response. You can even practice some techniques like Wim Hof breathing.
[17:43] I love Wim Hof breathing. Here on YouTube, there's a lot of videos that you can do that are free. So you can do it for 20 to 30 minutes, and three times a week, you're going to prime the response.
[17:56] So when it hits you, when that stress response hits you, you're ready. You're not practicing it in the moment. When you have a stress response, you're going to do it three or four times.
[18:08] So don't just do it once thinking that's the solution. The third thing I want you to think about is at the end of your day, I want you to take inventory of how your body responded to stress that day.
[18:22] And if it's like, wow, I did not respond well to stress, then maybe you add in a fourth session of this 20 to 30 minutes of practicing the cyclic sigh. So another really interesting technique for practicing your stress response and really good research is a 30-minute sauna session.
[18:42] So it has to do with heat. When you go through an experience of high heat, you're priming your stress response. So if you have a sauna at home, you can do your breath work in the sauna and you're really conditioning yourself for being able to take on more acute stress moments and handle them very differently.
[19:06] Our favorite sauna is called Sunlighten. I'll leave a link below because they give you guys all kinds of discount codes that can be incredible. So infrared sauna is my favorite for that stress response.
[19:19] Now, I just do want to point out that often it takes a community of people to practice this with. If you're around a lot of stressed out people, it's going to be much more difficult.
[19:31] I'm super proud of one of our Reset Academy members, Wendeline Davis, who said she has a heck of a monkey brain and that she responds very quickly to stress. And she started doing a technique of 25 minutes laying in the sand,
[19:47] and she must live near the beach and doing nothing. And she said it really has allowed her to be able to pause when a stressor hits her. And I love this.
[19:59] She said, I hear Paige's voice, Dr. Mindy's voice, and Bree and Kiru's voice. This is the team we have over in the Reset Academy to support you through all your health goals.
[20:11] But that's the impact of hanging out with people who believe in you and who are doing stress a lot different. Here are your three action steps that you can take right now.
[20:25] One, the next time you have a stress response, I want you to think about where it hit your body. Because, like, mine is the gut. Some people, it's the shoulders. Put in the comments what yours is. Q I want you to if you haven't tried the cyclic sign up until now try the cyclic sign do it
[20:43] practice it be incredible at it and number three is I want you to look at your calendar this is kind of a funny one I want you to look at your calendar and I want you to look at one trigger
[20:56] something that might trigger you this week and I want you to practice the cyclic sign beforehand so you are ready for the trigger, whether it's a person or a work event or something in your life.
[21:09] Let's get you ready for the trigger. Let's acknowledge the trigger, and let's practice this sign. So let me know if you want me to do more of these stress-oriented videos. I do a ton on hormones and metabolic health,
[21:22] and I'm starting to feel like your results with all the food and fasting that I have been giving you is only going to do better if you learn how to get your stress under control.
[21:34] And this cyclic sign is a beautiful start to that. So, as always, I hope that helps. If this helps, you're not going to want to stop there. Check out this video.