Parasympathetic Breathing with Dr. Jen Esquer

Want to hear one thing we all have in common? We are all breathing.  But there’s way more to it, did you know that our breath has the ability to dictate the way our body chooses to interpret certain situations? Dr. Jen Esquer shares about how we’ve been breathing wrong this whole time! Have a listen.

“Think about a breath cycle. We have the inhalation state and the exhalation state. I inhale and I exhale right? Well that inhalation phase, even if you were to hold your breath, that's your sympathetic fight, flight, freeze response.Your exhalation state, or we're even holding after your exhalation state is more of that parasympathetic rest, relax, digest state. Now, if we can tap into that exhalation phase, then we can start to shift and we can start to stimulate that vagus nerve and activate that parasympathetic system”.

That’s really good information, especially when you think of what we have been told to do our whole lives to calm ourselves down. Take a deep breath right? Well the better piece of advice might be, take a long exhalation. There’s a reason your heart speeds up when you breathe in and slows down when you breathe out, it’s your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system at work!