Episode 002 · 48 min
Resonance Breathing 101: Train Your HRV, Don't Chase It
Episode one argued that almost every nervous system technique being sold right now produces state change rather than trait change. This is the follow up, and it names the tool.
Trouble with the player? Watch it on YouTube.
What this episode argues
Resonance breathing is the practice Dr. Jay Wiles would keep if he had to give up every other one. It is also, strangely, the one almost nobody outside academic psychophysiology is teaching. Every popular nervous system creator will walk you through the physiological sigh, box breathing, or 4-7-8. Those are state tools. They answer the question of how to feel better in the next ninety seconds. None of them answer how to raise the floor.
You have probably heard someone say to breathe at six breaths a minute. That number is not folklore. Your body holds blood pressure steady through a reflex loop called the baroreflex, and the full loop takes about ten seconds to run. Six breaths a minute is five seconds in and five seconds out, which is that same ten seconds. Breathe at the speed of your own blood pressure control system and your heart rate begins swinging up and down with your breath in far bigger arcs than normal. That is the vagus nerve being worked, the same way a muscle gets worked.
Six is the average rather than the answer. Most adults sit somewhere between four and a half and six and a half, and this episode covers three different protocols for finding your own: the original stepped assessment developed by Paul Lehrer at Rutgers, the newer sliding method, and a dynamic approach that ignores what your rate was last time.
Also in this episode: the Soviet space program origin of all of this, why chasing a higher HRV number is usually chasing genetics, where the research actually sits, and the dose that produces change. It is smaller than people expect. Four or more days a week, eight to twelve minutes in a single unbroken session, six to eight weeks before any of it is readable.
Disclosure
Ohm is a company I work for and helped develop, and I use a discount code for it in this episode. The Resilient Engine app is mine as well. I talk about both here because they are what I actually use, and you should weigh what I say about them with that in mind. Nothing in this episode was paid for by anyone.
Chapters
- 00:00 Why almost nobody teaches this
- 03:08 What resonance actually is
- 05:43 Cosmonauts, and the move that made it work
- 08:08 A word from Ohm
- 10:13 Paul Lehrer, and finding one person's rate
- 11:34 HRV is not a vanity metric
- 13:20 The nervous system gym
- 14:01 The baroreflex, and what it is for
- 17:01 Why six breaths a minute is not arbitrary
- 21:15 What the research actually shows
- 22:25 The original protocol, step by step
- 24:27 Why taller people breathe slower
- 24:59 Newer and more precise methods
- 27:20 A method that ignores your last result
- 29:28 Practising without the hardware
- 36:49 How often, and for how long
- 40:10 A word from Thrive Wellness
- 42:09 Why past twenty minutes stops paying
- 43:21 What to measure, and it is not average HRV
- 44:00 Six to eight weeks before you judge it
- 45:46 The violin
Mentioned
- Evgeny Vaschillo and Bronya Vaschillo, who described cardiovascular resonance in 1983 while working with cosmonauts in the Soviet space program
- Dr. Paul Lehrer, Rutgers Medical School, who developed the original resonance frequency assessment protocol
- The baroreflex, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia
- HRV CV, the coefficient of variation of heart rate variability, which is the stability measure this episode argues for over average HRV
- Chris Williamson, on what resonance breathing feels like
- Ohm, the resonance lamp. My own company, see the disclosure above.
- The Resilient Engine app, which measures HRV through the phone camera and includes a resonance assessment. Also mine.
Next episode
Get it the day it goes out.
One email per episode. Nothing else.