The Fastest Way to Reduce Stress In Real Time

life happens and when you find yourself in a position where you are more alert and activated that you would like to be regardless of whether or not the stressor is relationship based or it's Financial or it's physical the tool that at least to my knowledge is the fastest and most thoroughly grounded in physiology and Neuroscience for calming down in a self-directed way is What's called the physiological sigh so we're taking the podium or we're sitting down at a zoom call and all of a sudden we're feeling flushed we're feeling like our heart is racing we're

feeling a little too alert we're feeling a little worked up and we want to calm down here's what doesn't work to control stress telling yourself to calm down in fact that tends to just exacerbate stress telling someone else to calm down also tends to exacerbate their stress if you want to reduce the magnitude of the stress response the best thing you can do is activate the other system in the body which is designed for calming and relaxation and that system is called the parasympathetic nervous system the parasympathetic nervous system has certain entry points or what

I'll call levers that will allow you to push back on the stress response in real time and diminish it and feel more relaxed really quickly so-call realtime tools and the tool that at least to my knowledge is the fastest and most thoroughly grounded in physiology and Neuroscience for calming down in a self-directed way is What's called the physiological sigh these days there seems to be a lot of interest in breath work breath work typically is when you go and you sit down or you lie down and you deliberately breathe in a particular way for a

series of minutes in order to shift your physiology access some states and it does have some utility that we're going to talk about that is not what I'm talking about now but I'm talking about when I refer to physiological size is the very real medical school textbook relationship between the brain the body and the body as it relates to the breathing apparate ey meaning the diaphragm and lungs and the Heart let's take the Hallmark of the stress response the heart starts beating faster blood is shuttled to the big muscles of the body to move move

you away from whatever it is the stressor is or just make you feel like you need to move or talk your face goes flushed Etc heart rate many of us feel is involuntary just kind of functions whether or not we're moving fast or moving slow if you think about it it's not really purely autonomic because you can speed up your heart rate by running or you can slow it down by slowing down by SL your run you can move to a walk or lie down but that's indirect control there is however a way in which

you can breathe that directly controls your heart rate through the interactions between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system here's how it works when you inhale so whether not it's through the nose or through the mouth this skeletal muscle that's inside your body called the diaphragm it moves down and that's because the lungs expand the diaphragm moves down your heart actually gets a little bit bigger in that expanded space there's more space for the heart so I'm not about your emotional heart getting bigger I'm talking about your actual physical heart getting a little bit bigger

the volume grows and as a consequence whatever blood is in there is now at a lower volume or moving a little bit more slowly in that larger volume than it was before you inhaled okay so more space heart gets bigger blood moves more slowly and there's a little group of neurons called the sinoatrial node in the heart that registers it's pay believe or not those neurons pay attention to the rate of blood flow through the heart and send a signal up to the brain that blood is moving more slowly through the heart the brain then

sends a signal back to the heart to speed the heart up so what this means is if you want your heart to beat faster inhale longer inhale more vigorously than your exhales now there are a variety of ways that one could do that but it doesn't matter if it's through the nose or through the mouth if your inhales are longer than your exhales you're speeding up your heart if your inhales are more vigorous so even if your inhales are shorter than your ex exhales you are speeding up your heart rate now the opposite is also

true if you want to slow your heart rate down so stress response hits you want to slow your heart rate down what you want to do is again capitalize on this relationship between the body meaning the diaphragm in the heart and the Brain here's how it works when you exhale the diaphragm moves up which makes the heart a little bit smaller it actually gets a little more compact blood flows more quickly through that compact space sort of like just a pipe getting smaller the sinoatrial node registers that blood is going more quickly sends a signal

up to the brain and the parasympathetic nervous system some neurons in your brain stem send a signal back to the heart to slow the heart down so if you want to calm down quickly you need to make your exhales longer and or more vigorous than your inhales now the reason this is so attractive as a tool for controlling stress is that it works in real time this doesn't involve a practice that you have to go and sit there and do anything separate from life and we are going to get to emotion emotions and stress happen

in real time and so while it's wonderful to have a breath work practice or to have the opportunity to get a massage or sit in a sauna or do whatever it is that you do in order to set your stress controls in the right direction having tools that you can reach to in real time that require no learning I mean I had to teach it to you you had to learn that but it doesn't require any plasticity to activate these Pathways so if you're feeling stressed you still need to inhale of course but you need

to lengthen your exhales now there's a tool that capitalizes on this in a kind of unique way a kind of a Twist which is the physiological sigh the physiological sigh was discovered in the 30s it's now been explored at the neurobiological level and mechanistically in far more detail by Jack Feldman's Lab at UCLA also Mark cno's Lab at Stanford and the physiological sigh is something that humans and animals do anytime they are about to fall asleep you also do it throughout sleep from time to time when carbon dioxide which we'll talk about in a moment

builds up too much in your system and the physiological side is something that people naturally start doing when they've been crying and they're trying to recover some air or calm down when they've been sobbing very hard or when they are in claustrophobic environments however the amazing thing about this thing that we call the diaphragm the skeletal muscle is that it's an internal organ that you can control voluntarily unlike your spleen or your heart or your uh your pancreas where you can't just say oh I want to make my pancreas turn out a little more insulin

right now I'm just going to do that with my mind directly you can't do that you could do that by smelling a really good donut or something but you can't just do it directly you can move your diaphragm intentionally right you can do it anytime you want and it'll run in the background if you're not thinking about it so this incredible pathway that goes from brain to diaphragm through What's called the frenic nerve p h re n i c frenic the frenic nerve innervates the diaphram you can control anytime you want you can double up

your inhales or triple up your inhales you can exhale more than your inhales whatever you want to do such an incredible organ and the physiological sigh is something that we do spontaneously but when you're feeling stressed you can do a double inhale long long exhale now I just told you a minute ago that if you inhale more than you exhale you're going to speed the heart rate up which would promote more stress and activation now I'm telling you to do a double inhale exhale in order to calm down and the reason is the double inhale

exhale which is the physiological sigh takes advantage of the fact that when we do a double inhale even if the second inhale is sneaking in just a tiny bit more air because it's kind of hard to get two deep inhales back to back you do big deep inhale and then another little one sneaking it in the little sacks in your lungs the evoli of the lungs your lungs aren't just too big bags but youve got millions of little sacks throughout the the lungs that actually make the surface area of your lungs as big as a

tennis court which is amazing if we were to spread that out what those tend to collapse as we get stressed and carbon di carbon dioxide builds up in our bloodstream and that's one of the reasons we feel agitated as well so and it makes us very jittery I mean there's some other effects of carbon dioxide I don't want to get into but when you do the double inhale exhale the double inhale reinflates those little sacks of the lungs and then when you do the long exhale that long exhale is now much more effective at ridding

your body and bloodstream of carbon dioxide which relaxes you very quickly my lab in collaboration with David Spiegel's lab David the associate chair of Psychiatry at Stanford are doing a study right now exploring how physiological size and other patterns of breathing done deliberately can modulate the stress response and other things related to emotionality those work are ongoing I want to be clear those studies aren't done but it's very clear from working our Labs from working Jack Feldman's lab and others that the physiological sigh is the fastest hardwired way for us to eliminate this stressful response

in our body quickly in real time and so I'm excited to give you this tool because I think most people have heard that mindfulness and meditation is good exercise is good for us we need to be getting enough sleep Etc but life happens and when you find yourself in a position where you are more alert and activated than you would like to be regardless of whether or not the stressor is relationship based or it's Financial or it's physical or anything like that you can look to the physiological side because it bypasses a very important feature

of how we function which is that it's very hard to control the mind with the Mind especially when we are in tighten states of activation when we are very alert or very sleepy it is very hard to use these so-called top- down mechanisms of intention and gratitude and all these things that are really powerful tools when we are not super activated and stressed or not super tired but when we are anywhere in the range of very alert and stress to very sleepy physiological size are a powerful way of bringing our level of so-called autonomic activation

which just means our level of alertness down and so whether or not it's in line at the bank or whether or not you're wearing a mask nowadays or you're not whatever I you know whatever the conditions may be where you're at and your needs when you're feeling stressed the physiological side done just one to three times so it would be double inhale exhale double inhale exhale maybe just two times will bring down your level of stress very very fast and as far as I know it's the fastest way to accomplish that [Music]