Summary:
Everyone breathes, but few are aware of their breath. Breathing deeper, consciously, is the AI of longevity. Breath is a smart real-life program that can process vast amounts of biological information and optimise for solutions to the eternal question of how to live long, and be healthy and happy. To be able to use the AI of breath, one has to become aware of it, like we need to download ChatGPT and update versions. Being aware and deliberately breathing deeper is the version 1 that starts a total transformation of life that can lead an ordinary human to be a superhuman eventually.
In the first blog in this series, we saw how heart rate is the sign of life, and how one can calm a literally failing heart by nothing else but this version 1 of Breath AI. We also saw how modern life with its lifestyles and various fascinating technologies leads to constant triggering of fight or flight response accumulating chronic stress that can be measured by Heart Rate Variability (HRV). In this blog, we will see the impact of this same Breath AI on the two other main components of our biology, the brain and the gut. Together this trinity of Heart, Brain and Gut manage everything that has kept us humans going as a species for the last hundred thousand years of our existence. Breath is the key to all of that, an AI of longevity for the next hundred thousand years by when humans will be a space faring civilisation.
A brief personal story:
As I started writing this blog and thinking about our magical brain first, I remembered an episode just a few weeks back, when I got a call in the middle of a board meeting I was attending. It was from my daughter desperately trying to reach me to tell me that my brother who was at home was suddenly motionless. I asked a few quick questions to establish what happened. It seemed he had just rolled up his eyes and had passed out. As I hurriedly excused myself from the other directors putting in motion a series of steps that needed to be done in terms of reviving him, getting doctor help and calling an ambulance, I thought of what could have been going on. I realised just as we don't know the state of the heart, we don't know the state of our brain too.
While it should not surprise us now as we routinely misread our hearts, we still believe that we know our brain well! Luckily my neighbour, a wonderful doctor who has practised in the USA for a long time, happened to be at home and came after hearing from my daughter what was going on. As he entered, my brother lay on his bed with his eyes rolled up, unresponsive. The good samaritan managed to bring life back with some quick steps just as the ambulance reached and emergency stabilisation was initiated in the hospital. Three days later as my brother was being moved from ICU to the normal ward, a young cardiologist who was taking care explained that a syncope may have occurred. In medical terms, this is temporary loss of consciousness for up to 3 minutes. Syncope occurs because blood is not reaching the brain. Apparently, my brother had multiple episodes of that in the half hour before the good neighbour had rushed in, and all of us had no clue about the state of his brain a few hours before. Syncope is apparently of 4 types of which cardiac (heart linked) is the most dangerous, which was likely the case for my brother, given his low heart pumping. Fortunately, things worked out and he is back home after more treatments hopefully making steady progress to eventual cure.
What this experience left me wondering was how little we know of our brain activity. I then remembered a friend's wife who had passed away 7 or 8 years back in her sleep due to an aneurysm. She seemed perfectly healthy and happy and actually fitter than her husband as per their medical tests just a couple of weeks before. Yet no one knew that there would be an unexplained sickness that was about to claim her life and leave two young kids behind. Clearly we need a way to reset our brain, just as we reset the hardware of our phone with a new version when there is too much chaos.
That reset is deep breathing.
Can we slow down the brain in chaos?
We usually touch our heart to tell someone that we genuinely feel something deep, and similarly we touch our head to show that we are thinking hard about something. The brain housed in the head is indeed the organ of thinking with its billions of neurons. But in reality, most of the thoughts are hard to control for a normal person. That’s why an overactive mind is seen as a monkey mind, spending a lot of precious metabolic energy without getting anywhere. If our body was a computer system, the brain would be its central processing unit including memory that also resides there. But who controls the brain and the mind? Like our heart, does it also work autonomously with no conscious control? Well, thankfully the brain can be governed voluntarily, and that is also through breath. Just like we can calm down a rampaging heart with calm breath, we can bring a chaotic mind under control by breath.
Breath is seen in conventional science as a means to provide metabolic energy in the form of gas exchange between oxygen and carbon dioxide powering the circulatory system and then the digestive system. Additionally it also serves as a seat of olfactory sense or smell, which is probably the most ancient of the 5 senses. What is underappreciated is that breath contains energies that innervate parts of the brain aiding the process of perception and cognition.
A signature of breath rhythm can be empirically recorded in different parts of the brain. This was known thousands of years ago in the eastern world, and is again getting underlined in western scientific media. The recent super popular podcast by Andrew Huberman of Stanford covers this to an extent, though this is just the beginning, or version 1. This fundamental yet underexplored aspect of brain and body interactions is the link between the respiratory and the nervous systems and others. What this means is that there are channels of energy in the inhalation and exhalation that trigger activity in the brain leading to possibly more productive thinking. Thus thoughts can be tuned by awareness of, attention on and channelling of breath path, with focus on the inflow, retention and outflow.
This knowledge extends from basics like nasal breathing instead of mouth which is version 0, deep vs shallow breathing as version 1 and all the way to more advanced understanding such as switching nostrils. Moving from science to technology, there are many techniques of gaining mastery over mind, starting with reducing breathing rate from average 15-20 breaths per min to 5-10 breaths per minute. Extending or deepening of breath is a process called diaphragmatic breathing, which reduces the number of breaths per minute and also calms the mind.
This technique increases the air flow pathway across the entire middle portion of the body till well below navel. Along with reducing the number of breaths, it also raises total ventilation or the volume of gas per breath with more oxygen being absorbed. The resultant respiration volume can go to 1-1.5 litre easily from 0.5 litre per breath. Thus a 1/3rd slowing down of breath rate and increasing the breath volume by 3x energises the body and the brain. The following picture shows how a hand on the stomach can help one ensure belly breathing.
So what are the channels through which these energies flow? Modern science considers the hormones and neurotransmitters as the reasons for the response for any stimulus. These are chemical messengers in the nervous system. There are 40 key neurotransmitters, of which 5 are major. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins are the so-called feel good ones. Norepinephrine is involved in the fight or flight response, also including the release of cortisol. But what leads to firing of the neurotransmitters? Deep diaphragmatic breathing can trigger the release of dopamine, the so-called happy hormone, in the brain. We may eventually be able to generate enough scientific evidence that fine tuning breath over a period of time with specially designed breath prescriptions can trigger other happy hormones eliminating distress and despair. Breath impact on all of physiology is starting to get noticed.
Gut connection:
The gut is seen as a second brain, with increasing focus on the gut-brain axis confirming the earlier term of “gut feeling,” or intuition, which is normally ascribed to the brain. Our gut is a collection of 100 trillion bacteria, quantitatively far higher than 86 billion neurons, and these are good bacteria which help us survive and thrive by digestion. Multiple features of modern life again destroy this beautiful flora. Without the gut engine, we would have no energy to grow. Like the heart has its own nervous system which seems to send a lot of messages to the brain as per Heartmath Institute, the gut also has its own nervous system. It is called the enteric nervous system. The fight or flight response building chronic stress shuts down digestion through this nervous system connection. Many modern practices such as antibiotic use, a Western diet (high in saturated fat, refined sugar, processed food), and high-stress lifestyles literally destroy gut bacteria. This in turn causes issues with immunity, which further leads to increasing allergies and resulting in a condition called “leaky gut,” where toxins from the gut are released back into the body leading to oxidative stress, inflammations, autoimmune response and further allergies. This is intertwined with mental health and sleep patterns, through a complex series of feedback loops as can be seen in the illustration below.
One would wonder what role can breath play in gut repair. Again diaphragmatic breathing has been advised for patients with GI (gastro intestinal) track problems, which are gut linked.
Breath Prescription to Manage Modern Life :
A lot of health problems today can be linked to changes in lifestyle far faster than the ability of the species to change its hardware as described in the last blog. Just as modern lifestyle builds chronic stress, with no solutions in sight, it also makes seeking short term solutions appear smart or normal. So for example, for helping Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), while changes in sleep rhythm or exposure to real/artificial sunlight can help, antidepressant medicines (like SSRIs) is seen as an easier fix, building dependence on those with potential side effects. Food allergies of various types are triggered due to increasingly compromised immune systems, and seasonal allergies that could be helped by stress reduction by way of meditation, exercise or sometimes just a hearty laugh are subjected to avoidance of the food or allergy medications. Neither of these cure the underlying cause. The challenge of quick fixes keeps growing exponentially as more and more processed food is consumed, while its impact on biology remains poorly understood.
For example, one standard can of cola has sugar equal to 6-8 teaspoonfuls, which no one is aware of despite being printed on the labels as 25-30 gm, because the visual quantity of 8 spoons is not emphasised. Consuming processed foods is correlated with increased health risk, with greater incidence of obesity and other markers that in turn seem to increase cardiovascular disease and cancer etc. The increase in mortality risk is high, just on account of one risk factor of processed foods (42%), and the same when combined with other lifestyle risk factors such as poor sleep, lack of exercise, positive actions may be leading to a much higher risk across the board.
One example of this is that the cases with Fibroids in young women in a city have gone up by 50% from pre-Covid, again connected to lifestyle! Ultimately, this results in an overactive heart that pumps desperately to compensate for everything, an emotionally challenged brain with lower and lower attention spans, and a leaky gut. High resting heart rate doubles mortality risk, an observational study showed. All this is usually also occurring with breathlessness, which was the case with my brother before it became too unbearable and led to a loss of consciousness. Breathlessness, or shallow breath or oral breath, is the ultimate indicator of cumulative lifestyle attacks on our biology. Thankfully, like I could slow down my heart with breath, we can reverse all of this with just breathing right.
Breathing right is breathing deep and consciously which invokes the power of the energies, a sort of biological superpower, or AI that resets everything. The more we breathe right, the more energetic we get and the more we progress from illness to wellness.
There will come a day when we will have a breath prescription for illnesses (or becoming superhuman), which is basically energy fine tuning like a medicine prescription today.
One stop solution to be superhuman:
Breath seems to be an answer for everything, from preventing heart attacks to emotional vibrancy to improving metabolism with gut health. Even in the worst cases like cancer, especially the one that is very hard to reach such as cancer of the heart, it is seen that diaphragmatic breathing can help reduce the ill effects of other treatment aspects such as radiation.
In summary, deliberate slow breathing seems to be like a magic pill for almost all issues from heart to brain to gut. And this is just one of the possibly hundreds of techniques within the science of breath energy modulation (or pranayama). Other techniques such as alternate nostril breathing, breath hold (holding inside or outside) and spreading breath across all parts of body distributing energy can help not just achieve health, but become superhuman and raise the level of consciousness. These will be covered in the third blog in this series.
This second blog is published couple of days after India landed on South Pole of the moon, which may have water and as such a launchpad for galactic travel for humanity. While this is an unmanned mission, it also reminds us that mastery over breath (Breath AI version “n”) will play a big role in future manned interplanetary missions.
In summary, philosophers and scientist Descartes’s famous Cogito, ergo sum followed by Immanuel Kant that proclaimed: I think, I exist (therefore I am), should possibly be amended to: I breathe, therefore I am & I exist!
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