Heart Breath Mind: Conquer Stress, Build Resilience, and Perform at Your Peak

A need for control. Excessive amounts of change (anything from moving several times to watching one’s parents get divorced) or repeated traumas can leave a physiological imprint resulting in a sense of a lack of control.

Think of resonance breathing as a high-performance alternative to yoga and meditation.

These deer, Levine says, have done what we, as humans, seem to have extreme difficulty accomplishing: they entered a state of sympathetic dominance—their brain’s way of protecting them—then fully regained balance, allowing their parasympathetic systems to not just brake but to recover. Animals, then, have the ability to seamlessly shift between sta

Negative self-talk. A client who may be battling a demeaning inner monologue may have internalized the voice of a critical parent or other authority figure.

Explore using one or more Power 10s (10 consecutive breaths in which you connect with the stressor on the inhale and release it from your body on the exhale) during your day to manage stress. This is called Mapping Out Your Power 10s. It may help to keep your homework tracking sheet handy throughout the day.

It turns out there is a particular rate of breathing, called resonance frequency, that maximizes the amplitudes of heart rate oscillations. For some people, it’s 6 breaths a minute; for others it might be 5 or 7. Regardless of the specific number, when you breathe at this rate, something amazing happens: it strengthens the baroreflex, creating even

You can anticipate when your trigger stressors are most likely to occur—8 a.m. highway traffic; your Monday meeting with your boss; holiday dinners with extended family—and insert a Power 10 in the moments before. Think of it as a planned intervention.

Heart rate variability is an indication of the balance within the two main branches of your autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system controls the fight-or-flight response, enabling your body to ramp up quickly to meet the demands of a stressful moment or prepare

Heart Clearing will occur only among individuals who are practicing 20 minutes of resonance breathing twice per day.