corporate health & performance prograM
Week 2
Breath, body, mind
In this week’s lesson it is my goal to reframe your understanding of stress management, mindset, and resilience and connect the dots between your breath, body, and mind. What does that even mean?
I intentionally lead with BREATH because it has the unique ability to BOTH operate autonomously in the background as we carry on with our day AND to be consciously overridden to change its pattern, rate, and depth.
I leave you with two questions to ponder:
1. What advantage do we gain from having both conscious and unconscious control over our breathing?
2. how might breathing influence our bodies and minds?
1
how you breathe matters
YOUR nose score
Answer the questions below. Over the past month how much have the following been a problem for you?
2
breathing and stress
“bad stress from an unpredictable experience may be the highest and fastest form of learning, however A negative adaptation is produced (ie trauma)…
“on the other hand, we can accelerate positive growth using an unpredictable experience when we are safe and able to regulate our breathing!”
— Coach Jared Callahan
3
air hunger and stress tolerance
Air Hunger, similar to appetite hunger, is sensory information from our “internal” world or interoception. This specific information provides feedback with each breath from both Carbon Dioxide and Oxygen chemical receptors in our bodies. In addition to these chemical receptors, our nervous system is gathering information from both our unconscious and conscious awareness to calculate how we respond to this feeling of air hunger including physical sensations, body temperature, heart rate, blood sugar level, and past experiences. The combination of chemical, electrical, and experiential information determines our individual response and directly influences our mood, emotions, and behaviors to this feeling!
It is this multi-dimensional response to air hunger that makes assessing and improving our “air hunger tolerance” potentially beneficial for improving anxiety, burnout, breathlessness and exercise performance.
assessing air hunger
Please follow the videos below and record your results!
