Author:: [[Huberman Lab]] DateFinished:: URL:: https://share.snipd.com/episode/6a6ff50d-378d-4edb-b44a-41685c14c956 Rating:: Tags:: # How to Breathe Correctly for Optimal Health, Mood, Learning & Performance  ## Highlights How to breathe to calm yourself down most quickly Key takeaways: (* Doing a physiological sigh can help you calm yourself down quickly., * Deep inhales through the nose help to maximally inflate the lungs, followed by a full exhale through the mouth to lungs completely empty.) Transcript: Speaker 1 The ability to calm yourself down most quickly by doing what's called a physiological sigh. I'll go into this in more detail in a little bit, but this is two very deep inhales through the nose. So the first one is a long inhale. And then the second one after that is a quick, sharp inhale to maximally inflate your lungs, followed by a full exhale through the mouth to lungs completely empty. ([Time 0:15:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0f4461b4-e4ea-4fa1-baa2-d0d36b3ad332)) How to Treat Sleep Apnea with Nasal Breathing Key takeaways: (* Excessive daytime sleepiness and excessive daytime anxiety are signs that someone might be suffering from sleep apnea., * There are a number of ways to treat sleep apnea, including using a CPAP machine., * One way to treat sleep apnea is to learn to nasal breathe during sleep.) Transcript: Speaker 1 Excessive daytime sleepiness and excessive daytime anxiety combined with daytime sleepiness is one sign that you might be suffering from sleep apnea. The other thing is if you happen to snore, it's very likely that you are experiencing sleep apnea. And I should mention that sleep apnea is a very serious health concern. It greatly increases the probability of a cardiovascular event, heart attack, stroke. It is a precursor or sometimes the direct cause of sexual dysfunction in males and females, cognitive dysfunction during the daytime. It can exacerbate the effects of dementia, whether or not it's age-related, dementia of the normal sort or Alzheimer's type dementia, which is an acceleration of age-related cognitive decline. If you're somebody who's had a traumatic brain injury, if you're experiencing a lot of stress, sleep apnea is going to greatly disrupt the amount of oxygen brought into your brain and body during sleep and is going to lead to a number of nighttime and daytime issues. So it's something that really needs to be addressed. And we'll get into this a bit more later, but since I raised it as a problem, I do want to raise the solution. One of the major treatments for sleep apnea is that people will get a CPAP device, which is this face mask and a machine that they'll sleep with. And while those can be very effective, not everyone needs a CPAP. One of the more common methods nowadays that's being used to treat sleep apnea, which is purely behavioral and intervention and is essentially zero cost, is that people are starting to shift deliberately to nasally sleep apnea. And deliberately to nasal breathing during sleep because of the additional resistance of nasal breathing and because of the fact that there's far less tendency, if any, if any, excuse me, to snore when nasal breathing, taping the mouth shut using medical tape prior to sleep, excuse me, putting medical tape on the mouth prior to going to sleep and then sleeping all night with medical tape on the mouth is one way that people can learn to nasal breathe during sleep and can greatly offset a lot of sleep apnea, snoring and sleep related issues. A number of people don't want to or don't feel safe putting medical tape on their mouth prior to sleep. For some reason, they think they're going to suffocate, but of course you would wake up if you start to run out of air at any moment. So that's not so much a concern, but what they'll do is they will start to use pure nasal breathing during any type of exercise or even just for some period of time walking during the day or while working. ([Time 0:48:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4870f9f2-7dc5-47f5-8ce2-28a26f5b4de9))