[Music] there are all manner of purported hiccup cures everything from chew aemon inhale Pepper or our dog's favorite a spoonful of peanut butter here's the technique excited to try next time I get hiccup Supra Supra maximum inspiration you take a very deep breath hold for 10 seconds then breathe in even more hold for another 5 seconds then one final tiny breath in and hold for five last seconds and an immediate and permanent termination to hiccups was achieved when I was a kid I taught myself how to control my own hiccups using slow paced breathing and
I was excited to see there was finally a case report written up on it it's really neat there's a nerve called the Vagas nerve that goes directly from our brain to our chest to our stomach and connects our brain back and forth to our heart and our gut and even our immune system the Vagas nerve is like the hard wirring that allows our brain to turn down inflammation within our body when you hear about the Mind Body Connection that's what the Vegas nerve is and does so there's been increasing interest in treating a wide range
of disorders with implanted pacemaker like devices for stimulating Vegas nerve Pathways but certain Eastern Traditions like yoga chiong and Zen figured a way to do it without having electrodes implanted into your body let me explain how a healthy heart is not a metronome your heart rate goes up and down with your breathing when you breathe in your heart rate tends to go up when you breathe out your heart rate tends to go down you can pause this video and test it out on yourself right now by feeling your pulse change as you breathe in and
out I'll wait Isn't that cool see that heart rate variability is a measure of vagal tone the activity of your vagus nerve and so the game to play next time you're bored is to try to make your heart rate speed up and and slow down as much as possible within each breath this can be done because there's a whole other oscillating cycle going on at the same time that speeding then slowing your heart rate based on momentto moment changes in your blood pressure and is any physics geek can tell you all oscillating feedback systems with
a constant delay have the characteristic of resonance meaning you can boost the amplitude if you get the Cycles in sync it's it's like pushing your kid on a swing if you get the timing just right you can boost them higher and higher similarly if you breathe in at just a r frequency you can force the Cycles in syn and boost your heart rate variability and why are we doing that again because that allows us to affect the function of our autonomic nervous system via vagal afference to brain stem nuclei like the locus culus activating hypothalamic
vigilance areas or leas according to the neurophysiologic mod model postulation I mean duh uh and why are we doing this again it's not just a cure hiccups practicing slow breathing a few minutes a day may have lasting beneficial effects on a number of medical and emotional disorders including asthma irritable bowel syndrome fibromyalgia and depression though in the USFA we've put it to use improving batting performance in baseball now to date most Studies have lacked proper controls and used fancy bof feedback machines to determine each person's resonant frequency but for most people it comes out to
be about 5 and 1/2 breaths per minute so a full breath in and out about every 11 seconds when musicians were randomized into slow breathing groups with or without biof feedback slow breathing helped regardless same with high blood pressure you can use this technique to significantly drop your blood pressure within minutes the hope is if you practice this a few minutes a day you can have long lasting effects the rest of the day breathing normally practice what exactly slow breathing five or six breaths per minute split equally between breathing in and breathing out should do
it so like 5 seconds in then 5 Seconds out all the while breathing shallowly and naturally you don't want to hyperventilate natural shallow breaths but just breathing really slowly try it the next time you get hiccups works for me every every time [Music]
