Transcription
Most doctors describe high blood pressure as a condition you have, something fixed that you're stuck with for life. But the truth is, blood pressure isn't a static number. It's created every single time your heart beats; you make blood pressure. And it changes from moment to moment depending on your state. And if you can change your state, you can change your blood pressure, usually in just minutes.
Hello health champions. Today we're going to talk about the number one absolute best way to lower your blood pressure in just minutes. But for this to make any sense and for you to be able to really use it, we need to understand what blood pressure is. Why do we have it? How is it created? And why does it change?
Blood pressure is needed to move blood. If we have more pressure on one end of a tube than the other, the blood is going to move through that tube. That's basically what it's all about. And the reason we have that is so that we can move nutrients. So we can transport nutrients, oxygen, and fuel to all of the tissues, all the cells of the body. And the strength of the blood pressure depends on the force of the heart contraction. It's a muscle that's squeezing the blood, creating that pressure against the resistance of the vessels and that creates what we call blood pressure. And it's usually measured with two numbers. So the systolic ideally at 120 is when the heart is squeezing and the diastolic is when the heart is relaxing and filling up with blood again, but the body is maintaining that peripheral pressure, that resistance of the blood vessel, and that's the diastolic, usually around 80.
But then the question is, the thing that we call high blood pressure. If it gets high, why does that happen? What are the factors? What are the circumstances? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? And I really urge you to watch this video carefully from beginning to end because if you really understand and grasp and apply all the things we're going to talk about, then this could be life-changing. If you're just skimming through and you're looking for what is that one thing, you can try it and it's going to work, but you're not going to stick with it because you don't understand how profound and life-changing this could be.
And blood pressure is regulated by your ANS, by your autonomic nervous system. And that's the thing that runs behind the scenes that you don't have to pay attention to. Autonomic also means automatic. It does things for you. And the real purpose is to allocate resources. It's to decide where does the blood go. The blood carries the protein and the fat and the carbs and the glucose and the oxygen. And the ANS decides where do we send this? Where is it most important right now? And the ANS monitors, it listens to your internal conversation. It listens to your thoughts. It listens to your automatic reactions to your environment and it listens to all of the chemical messengers, to the hormones and the neurotransmitters and the chemical messengers. And based on all of that, it decides where are we going to send this blood and how much are we going to send right in this minute. And monitoring all that is a lot of work. So your autonomic nervous system is processing billions of bits of information per second in comparison to the thousands of bits per second that your conscious awareness is processing. So you pay attention to little things. You take snapshots of your environment with your attention. That's thousands of bits. So your autonomic nervous system is processing millions of times more information than you consciously process.
So there's a few different reasons why your blood pressure could be high. And we're going to skim over the first ones and we're going to focus on the second half of this. So first is metabolic. And it's not that this is unimportant, but you can't change that in minutes. So if you have insulin resistance, then that insulin resistance is going to trigger a stress response. Insulin does that. And the basic reason for that is if you eat food, then your body is in a state of plenty. It needs to process through that food and for a very short time, it needs to increase circulation, increase blood flow to transport to distribute all that food, all those nutrients to the different body parts that are supposed to absorb them. And that's a normal thing. So whenever you eat, there's going to be a short sympathetic, a short stress response, just like a little bump, and then it goes away once these things are absorbed into the muscles and to the tissues. Now we go back to baseline and we kick in the parasympathetic, and we'll talk more about these terms, which is the relaxation response. So that now the cells can process this food. They can manipulate it. They can turn it into tissue. They can turn it into energy and fully digest and utilize it. Now, that's supposed to be a very short sympathetic bump. But if you're insulin resistant, if you have chronically high insulin, then the brain, the hypothalamus interprets that as a chronic stress, as a chronic reason, as a long-term reason to have an increased sympathetic drive. So that's how insulin resistance actually drives a stress response. And it's basically because your metabolism is clogged up.
But there's a second part to this metabolic function and that is kidney retention. So normally, when we have an increase in fluid volume, then there's an increase in blood pressure. It's like you're pumping water into a balloon. The more you pump it, the bigger the balloon is going to get and the higher the pressure inside that balloon until it finally bursts. Well, a higher fluid volume in your vascular system will result in higher blood pressure. But there's a normal regulating mechanism here called pressure diuresis. So it's like a safety valve. Whenever the pressure increases, water leaks out. So with more fluid, then there's going to be more water, more fluid passing through the kidneys. It pushes itself out because you have these little finger things that are like filters, and more pressure is simply going to push more fluid out. And we're going to reabsorb less because there's already too much fluid in the vascular system. So the kidneys can figure this thing out. And this increased excretion now results in less fluid volume and we go back to normal blood pressure. And that is how it always works, except with a few exceptions. And one of those would be if you exercise, for example. When you exercise, your blood pressure goes up. Does that mean that you get rid of a bunch of fluid because of that blood pressure and you have to wet your pants every time you exercise? No. Because your body is smart. It knows that exercise is a special case. So during exercise, it's going to increase the retention. Even though that extra blood pressure is squeezing the fluid out, the kidneys are going to reabsorb more to maintain the same fluid volume despite that higher blood pressure. So the body knows with different types of stress, with different types of sympathetic nervous system activation, which is the fight or flight, then there will be increased retention. The kidneys are supposed to reabsorb more of that fluid. And like we just talked about on the previous slide, insulin, increased chronic high insulin is also a form of stress. So therefore, that will also increase that retention of sodium and water and therefore maintain a high blood pressure. However, exercise is a normal form where we're supposed to do that. Insulin is not normal. That's a disease process or an adaptation that is not good for us.
But in addition to those metabolic reasons that we talked about, there's also a neurological reason for increased blood pressure. And short-term, that's the one that has the greatest impact. And that is based on your perceived need. When your nervous system detects a situation where it thinks, "Hey, this guy is going to need a lot of extra energy in the next few moments." So, if you suddenly find yourself in danger, or if you're exercising hard, or if you're in a fight, now your body senses that and it says, "This guy is going to need to fight or flee. Fight, flight." So he's going to need a lot more oxygen and fuel in the short-term future and therefore we are going to dramatically increase your blood pressure and your blood glucose. So if that happens, if you were a caveman, one of your ancestors, and you're walking around and all of a sudden a saber-tooth tiger shows up out of nowhere, based on experience, he's a lot bigger. He's got big teeth. You're probably gonna run and that's the flight portion. And when that encounter happens, you could probably increase your blood pressure almost by double in a matter of seconds because you're just trying to mobilize that many resources. Your muscle tension goes up and in the next few seconds, your blood glucose also goes up. But the key to understand is that this system is perfect. It's designed for survival, but it's also designed for very short bursts of activity. You're not supposed to stay in that fight or flight forever. When that tiger shows up, you run and either you make it or the tiger is victorious and you end up dead. But either way, it was very short term. It's not like today's stress because your body doesn't tell the difference. It doesn't really care if it's a saber-tooth tiger or if it's a bill or a deadline or a rude person or being stuck in traffic when you have somewhere to be. The magnitude of stress may be different, but the response is the same. And there needs to be a balance.
So we have our fight or flight, which is also known as your sympathetic nervous system. That's just the name of it. It's the branch of your autonomic nervous system that speeds things up. And it responds, like we said, by increasing heart rates, by increasing blood pressure, by increasing muscle tension, increasing blood glucose. But it needs to be balanced by its counterpart, the parasympathetic, also known as feed, breathe, or rest, digest. And we call it short here, para for parasympathetic, and it does all the other stuff. So the sympathetic keeps us alive against emergencies outside. The parasympathetic keeps us alive by taking care of our vital organs and our insides. So digestion, for example, and immune function, all of those are handled by the parasympathetic nervous system. So anytime that we have a significant amount of stress where we increase our sympathetic function, then the body is going to allocate that blood, allocate those resources to immediate survival. So as soon as the sympathetic goes up significantly, the parasympathetic is going to go down. And this is why so many people with chronic stress have digestive problems and immune problems. They get sick all the time, or reproductive function, or healing. It just doesn't work optimally when we're under chronic stress. So when we have this situation with chronic stress, then we find ourselves stuck and out of control.
So let's talk about what you can control. And this brings us to the topic of today's video. Can you control your blood pressure directly? If somebody tests you and they say you have high blood pressure, you go ahead and lower it right now. And the harder you try, the more counterproductive it's probably going to be. And it's probably going to go up because you're trying, you get frustrated. Same thing with heart rate. Can you change your heart rate? Can you lower your heart rate? No, it's not under voluntary control. Can you make more hydrochloric acid? Someone says you're not digesting food properly. Make some more hydrochloric acid. No, you can't do that. You can't affect your interleukin 6, which is an inflammatory marker, an inflammatory messenger. If someone asks you to do those things, you don't know how to do it.
But what can you control? You can control your breath. You can consciously change how you breathe. Even though that is normally under automatic autonomic control, it's done for you. You don't have to think about it. You can think about it and change it. And same thing with your thoughts. You can direct your thoughts, even though most thoughts are running on automatic by habit. You can focus differently and change them if you choose to. And here is the key to understand. This is so exciting because you can change your breath and your thoughts. That becomes the window into your autonomic nervous system. Now you have a way of influencing these things indirectly in another way.
And here is the connection between your breath and your autonomic nervous system. When you breathe in, your heart speeds up. You fire off a little bit of sympathetic, not like a dramatic thing, but a tiny little bit of stress response of sympathetic firing. And now your heart rate goes up and your blood pressure goes up just a tiny little bit. And why does it do that? Because whenever you breathe in, there is more air, more oxygen in the lungs. So it's more efficient to send a little extra blood through the lungs when there is more oxygen there. And conversely, when you breathe out, now you fire off the other side. You fire off the parasympathetic. Parasympathetic goes up, sympathetic goes down, and your heart rate slows and your blood pressure comes down. And again, it's smart because when you breathe out, there's less oxygen. Let's back off a little bit on the blood flow through the lungs. So you can increase the efficiency of the system a good bit with having this built-in mechanism. And of course, this is built in for you. You don't have to think about that. All you have to know is when you breathe in, you do one thing, and when you breathe out, you fire off another thing.
So why do you have to consciously change your breath? Why isn't this genius system taking care of it for you automatically all the time? And it's because we are always so busy. We're always so stressed. The normal, quote unquote, breath rate is 18 breaths per minute. If you go to the doctor and they check your breath rate and you're 18 to 20 breaths, that's normal. But what does that mean? That means you're breathing in for about two seconds and you're breathing out for about one second. And I rounded these off. It's like 1 point something. So your breath basically looks like this. And that's how most, I exaggerate just a little bit, but that's how most people breathe. And how much parasympathetic, how much relaxation response do you think you're going to get throughout the day if you just breathe out for one second? It's not enough time for that half of the seesaw to kick in.
So now when you consciously change your breath and you go down on purpose to six breaths per minute and you count. So you do this on purpose and you make sure you breathe in for about four to five seconds. It's not critical. It's not exact, but approximately four to five seconds. And you breathe out at least that long, five to six seconds. And again, plus or minus one second, doesn't matter at all. Just do this and we'll go through it. And do what feels comfortable for you. But you see what's happening when you do that is the time that you fire off your parasympathetic nervous system, your relaxation response, your healing response, just went up fivefold. You're firing those neurons off. You're in that state five times longer. And that allows your heart rate and your blood pressure to come down. And then you keep this up, six breaths per minute, for as little as one minute or up to five minutes, or even 30 seconds. Even just three breaths can make a huge difference just to interrupt what's going on.
But the pace of breathing, even though it's super important to slow it down, it's not enough. We also have to understand how the breath works and how to perform it. So, there's three different muscles in the body or three groups of muscles that does the breath for you. Your lungs are basically bags with little compartments, millions of little compartments in them. And they're completely passive. They're enclosed in a vacuum and they only expand because there are muscles pulling on the tissues next to them. So the muscles we use to breathe are called the diaphragm. And the diaphragm is a dome-shaped muscle that sits over your abdominal organs, just like this. And when that muscle contracts, it flattens out and it pushes the abdominal contents downward. So when you breathe properly, your belly is supposed to come out. That's supposed to happen. Now, unfortunately, so many people are concerned about their flat stomach that they force their stomach in when the diaphragm is pushing down. And now they're kind of short-circuiting the whole system and they're using other muscles and creating stress.
The second important muscle for breathing is called your intercostal muscles. And costal, that's for ribs. That's another name for your ribs. So it's muscles in between your ribs. And one way to visualize this is that these muscles, the ribs are like bucket handles. They're hanging down off the side of the bucket. And if you were to raise those handles just a little bit, then you expand the whole rib cage just a little bit and it's moving up and out ever so slightly. So that's what the intercostal muscles do. And then there is one more muscle group and those are the accessory muscles. And I put them down below because they're like a different story. We'll get to that. The accessory muscles, they pull from the top of the rib cage and from your collarbone and up. And that's not a normal way of breathing. That's not what you want to do when you're doing these types of breaths.
So, we'll go through this in detail so you know exactly how this works. So for the diaphragm, the portion where your diaphragm is pushing down and your abdominal contents are being pushed out, you count to three. So that first portion is one, two, three. And during that time, only the abdominal area should move. Your belly should come out. And then if you wanted to keep going with only the diaphragm, it would be strained. So then the intercostal muscles kick in. So when you go to a count of four and five, now your rib cage expands ever so slightly and it's going to lift up just a little bit, but it's not going to involve the shoulders. And then after that slight expansion of the rib cage, now you just let it rest for just, you could rest for a second, maybe two seconds, or just a fraction of a second. It doesn't matter. But there's a point where you're done with the breath where nothing's happening. So you breathe in one, two, three, four, five, six, and it just sits there. Okay. And we'll go through this a few times so you really get it. And you can try this as we go.
And then you want to focus on your breath being very slow. It should be completely silent. It should be so slow that you make no noise. You should not hear it because then you're breathing too much air. This is also not what we would call a deep breath. It could be a tiny bit deeper than a shallow breath like your normal shallow breath. Just go. That's shallow. You can go a little bit deeper, but it's not a deep breath where you fill your lungs because now you're kicking in these accessory muscles and it becomes more of a forced breath. And then obviously after that, you breathe out. And this is a completely passive process. That's for a count of one through six. And you take a rest at the bottom when, when the air has left. Then there's a moment where you have a very brief rest. And this exhalation, the breathing out is passive. It's just the elastic recoil. So when you breathe in, even though it's very gentle, you're tightening up some muscles in your diaphragm and your rib cage. And when you breathe out, you just let them relax and they're going to return to their original shape. And these accessory muscles, they're important, but not for breathing exercises. They are for doing deep forced breaths, like in an emergency or if you take a super quick, if you sniff in like, then that's like an emergency breath. You see your like the muscles, the tendons on the front of your neck kick in because those muscles are pulling the rib cage and the collarbone upwards. Now, you don't want to do that at all during this type of breathing because that is tied to a stress response. When you have an emergency, that's a stress response. You're trying to get as much air in as fast as possible, but that is very counterproductive to what we do here. And for the people who are supposed to breathe from their diaphragm, but they're concerned with their belly going out, so they hold their stomach in, what usually happens is they switch to using their accessory muscles instead and they breathe like this, which is not very relaxing at all. And another important thing is when I say the slow and silent and not too deep. A lot of people who try to do this, they breathe too fast, but they know they're supposed to keep the in-breath for five seconds. So they just overfill their lungs and very often they get dizzy and lightheaded and they say, "Oh, this doesn't work. I get dizzy." No, you're breathing too much. You're taking in way too much air. That's why I really emphasize the slow, silent, and just maybe 20, maybe 50% deeper than a shallow breath. But it should be very, very relaxed and quiet and silent.
So, let me show you one more way that you can think about this. And if this represents a breath, then at the very beginning, which would be at the end of your last outbreath, there's a slight pause. It's just a period where nothing is happening. You're not breathing in, you're not breathing out, and then all of a sudden the breath just kind of starts by itself. It's like here, nothing's happening. And all of a sudden, you notice, hey, air is coming in. And then it goes up. And now one, two, three is the only the belly moving. So I'm going to be quiet and just kind of show you. So that's the one, two, three. And then we have the four and five, which looks like your rib cage just expands a little bit, very gently, very relaxed. And then right at the top here is again a period where you're not breathing in, you're not breathing out. There's just nothing happening. And all of a sudden, maybe it's half a second, maybe it's two seconds, you're finding yourself breathing out again. And you just very, very gently and slowly, passively release that air. And then at the end here, which is the beginning of the next breath, there's a period where nothing's happening. And then all of a sudden, you're breathing in again. So, I know this is a lot of technical explanation, but it's just to try to help you understand how it's going to work. Obviously, when you're doing it later, and the more you do it, the more this is going to run on automatic.
And once you have the mechanics down, there's this little thing called emotion that can act as a multiplier to the relaxation effects and to the benefit. So once you have the mechanics down, now when you breathe in, you visualize breathing in life or health or joy or anything else that works for you, that makes you feel really good, that makes sense to you. And then as you breathe out, now you visualize breathing out stress or tension or problems. You could tell yourself, "In this moment, everything is absolutely okay. I can put everything away just for this moment. I can start worrying again in a minute. That's all right. I know I have these issues I got to deal with, but for right now, I'm allowing myself not to bother with that." You could also visualize putting down your burdens. Like life very often feels like a burden and you can imagine that you're carrying it all on your shoulders and then on the outbreath, you're just allowing yourself to put it down just for now. And usually when you do that, you can feel yourself sort of getting an inch taller instantaneously. It's such a wonderful relief. You can also during this whole process, breathing in or out or both, you could just silently say the word "calm" to yourself or say the word "peace" to yourself. Other words you could try is "happy" or "content" or "bliss," which means that you just feel good for absolutely no reason other than that you're feeling good. And this is very different from how we're typically conditioned because we're always told that we should strive, we should work hard, we only deserve to feel good when we have accomplished something. So first you work really hard, you feel really bad, you overcome something, and then you accomplish a goal, and then you're allowed to feel happy without guilt. But the problem with that is that once you have accomplished this thing, there's another thing and another thing and another thing. So if you don't allow yourself to feel good during the process, then you will never arrive at that happiness. Happiness is not something that you get to. Feeling good is not something you get to. It's something that you are. It's something that you allow yourself to be. So you want to change this: "accomplish in order to be happy" and you want to change that to: "happy in order to accomplish."
So once you do these exercises and you do this breathing exercises, whether it's for 30 seconds or five minutes, and you're going to notice with just a little bit of practice how incredibly effective this is, not just in lowering blood pressure, but in just feeling good. And you allow yourself to take that feeling with you. You will notice that you can still get things done. You can still accomplish things. In fact, you do them even better. But the biggest difference is you're feeling good as you do them. So, I would encourage you either now or later to bookmark this and then you replay the last two slides and you practice the breath as I described it and you practice with these words and you practice with these visualizations and scenarios. And I think you'll find in just a couple of breaths, sometimes that even the first breath, you notice how you feel completely different.
So what actually happens now that we've learned how to do it? You may have practiced and you're feeling good, but what actually happens in the body? Well, short-term and long-term, there's some profound differences. So short-term, the very first thing and dramatically important is a pattern interrupt. When we feel stressed, when we feel tense, when we have high blood pressure, it's because we're in a certain state. And that state is created by our thoughts, which usually run in an automatic loop. And the first thing that your breath, your slow breath accomplishes is to interrupt that pattern. You're just doing something different. That thought loop cannot continue when you interrupt it. And next, of course, I mentioned that you're going to go from firing your vagus nerve, your parasympathetic nervous system, your relaxation response. You go from firing that for about one second up to about five seconds. You're allowing it time to kick in. And as a result, your heart rate will go down and your blood pressure will go down. For some people, it's going to happen within seconds or a minute or three. And for other people, they kind of have a lot of "stuckage." Their physiology is just not that flexible yet. And it could take practicing this for a few weeks, but it doesn't mean that it's not working. It just means that you have to fire more parasympathetic for a longer period of time. It's like you're chipping away at something and it's going to take a while before it gives. You're going to stabilize your heart rhythms. When they do EKGs and when they measure your heart function, they measure how steady the rhythm is and they measure your arrhythmias, the irregularities, and you're going to find that all of that gets better. What also happens is vasodilation. You're going to relax your blood vessels, which results in warmer hands and feet. So, if you're suffering from cold hands and feet, then these exercises are probably going to take care of that as well pretty dramatically. And again, it's not going to work if you're sitting in an ice cold air conditioning rooms where the vent is blasting on you. You're not going to overcome that. But if you're sitting in a comfortable room and you still have cold hands and feet, then that's not a good thing. That's a stress response. That's the vasoconstriction of stress keeping the blood from flowing through your hands and feet. You will also notice a decrease of sweating of the palm of your hand. And for some people, this is not a big deal. For others, it's devastating. It can ruin their life. They can't touch anything because they leave wet spots everywhere. If they put a hand on a shirt, it leaves a big hand imprint. It can be that bad. Some people, they never want to shake hands with anybody because it's so embarrassing. Or you see people wiping their hands on their pants before they reach out to greet you. Now, that's excessive sweating and it's driven by your stress response and it can be dramatically reduced by these exercises. And you will also notice an increase in your ability to focus and stay calm even under stress because you're training your body to reduce the stress response. And the stress response is going to allocate resources for you to run away. It's going to take blood away from your focus center, the frontal lobe. So, as you relax, as you increase your relaxation response, as you warm your hands and feet, you're also going to get more blood back to your frontal brain and increase your focus and your calm. And I'll never forget a teenage kid I had as a patient. He came in for back pain or some musculoskeletal issue, but he had all these things I was talking about. He wouldn't shake hands. He would wipe his hands. He was a super smart kid, but he did so poorly on tests. He was getting B's and C's at best. And he was afraid of meeting girls because his hands were so sweaty. He was nervous all the time. So I had him work on these exercises and within weeks his sweating was down dramatically. Within a couple of months, he went from a B or C student to straight A's on all his tests, and he was so calm and feeling so much better instead of having anxiety. And again, everyone's different. For some people, you're going to see changes like that in a matter of weeks. And for others, it could take a year. You could have a whole lot of chipping away to do, but it's still worth doing it because you're changing things for the better. Even things you don't notice, you're going to be improving them in the process.
And long term, it gets really, really exciting because there's something called neuroplasticity. Most people, especially the ones who don't watch this whole video, they're just looking for that 30-second tidbit. They're going to try this and they go, "Oh yeah, I felt better, but it didn't last." Well, it's because you didn't do it again and again and again. And that's where neuroplasticity comes in. Neuroplasticity is the ability of your nervous system to change, to physically change shape, to rewire itself, to repattern and retrain. Whenever you learn a new skill, then you're making new synapses. You're making new connections. Your nervous system is rewiring itself. And staying calm and breathing different is a skill. That's a state in your nervous system. That's a skill and you can learn it. And in doing this, you're learning the skill of calm. You're learning the skill of better focus. But the parasympathetic and the vagus nerve, it does handle blood pressure. It will help you lower blood pressure, but it does so much more. It handles the supply to all your vital organs. So, as you're doing these exercises, you're strengthening the vagus nerve. You're rewiring more in favor of the vagus nerve. And now the vagus nerve is being fed. It's getting its information and firing from the cranial nerve 10 nucleus, which sits up in the brain stem. And as that nucleus, as that center is getting stronger and growing bigger, now you're improving all the other things that that center controls at the same time. You're improving your digestion. You're improving your ability to make hydrochloric acid if you need it. If it's low, if it's already good, you're not going to make more because the body is smart. Your digestive enzymes are going to start kicking in again. But it doesn't even stop there. Your immune system is also regulated by the same mechanism. When you reduce your sympathetic firing and bring it in balance with the parasympathetic, your immune system works better. Your reproductive function, your fertility, erectile dysfunction, it's all part of the same autonomic balance. Your healing responses, your DNA repair. Every moment you're repairing DNA, you're getting mutations and your infinitely smart body is repairing at the DNA level. But that works a whole lot better if your sympathetic and your parasympathetic system are in balance. And at the same time, like we said, you're going to improve your focus, your ability to stay calm, especially under stress. You reduce your anxiety both in the moment you're doing it and long term if you keep up with it. If you have less anxiety, if you're more calm, you're going to sleep better and on and on and on. And you thought you clicked on this video just to learn a trick to lower blood pressure. Well, it's all connected. And in the sick care system, in the mainstream system, they think all of these things are separate isolated random functions that you have to address one by one. If you have too much stomach acid, if you have heartburn, we give you a blocker of some kind. If you have something else, we'll block that. We'll suppress that. Doesn't work like that. When you address something at the core, at the root cause, then one thing is going to prove another and another and another. Because when things work, they just work.
And here's the best part. The more you do it, the longer you keep it up, the more permanent these changes become. Because neuroplasticity kind of means two things. Plasticity is the ability of something to change. But they can also make plastic changes, meaning that we actually lay down more tissue. The active tissue gets thicker. It gets stronger. It increases in volume. So all of the brain areas that support and provide that parasympathetic output are going to get stronger. The wires supplying that information are going to get thicker. They're going to get more myelinated because anything that you use more grows stronger. Anything you don't use, you lose. Use it or lose it. And this is the magic of neuroplasticity that most people don't understand. They think, "Yeah, but I did it for five minutes. I felt better for 10 minutes, but then it went right back." Well, it's because you didn't do it again and again. And you didn't do it enough to truly rewire your nervous system and to lay down those plastic changes.
So, to really make this life-changing, you do have to also change your diet and your lifestyle if you're insulin resistant. Because if you're insulin resistant, that's always going to drive that stress response and that inflammation and that tendency for sodium retention and high blood pressure. So, make sure you take care of that also. But in terms of the topic of this video, what you want to do, the most important thing that you want to do is you want to pay attention. Notice how you feel. Make it a priority. Write it down. How am I feeling? Pay attention. Put it on your computer screen. Check. How am I feeling right now? And if you're feeling tense, if you're feeling frustrated, if you're feeling angry, do something about it. And the what you do is you take three breaths exactly like we described. You count to five. You count one, two, three from the diaphragm. You count four, five from the intercostals. You rest. And you passively let the air go out. And those three breaths will take you 30 seconds. And you cannot tell me you don't have 30 seconds. Especially if it's going to put you in a better place where you can be more focused and more productive. And you do that every time that you remember and make sure you remember a lot to check how you feel. You take three breaths to reset yourself.
In addition to that, you schedule five minutes a day when you can sit down and just sort of relax and meditate and focus on these words that we went through. And with five minutes, you're going to build a whole lot more plasticity. You're going to build more plastic permanent changes. But even just doing the three breaths 10 times or 20 times throughout the day can be incredibly powerful. And once you got this going, make sure that you make it a habit. And then when you make it a habit, you allow for those long-term plastic changes to take effect. And then watch your life change. So mark your calendar. Take me up on this challenge. Mark your calendar and then you come back in 30 days or 60 days or 90 days and you write a little comment and you tell people about those changes. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.