Dr. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neural plasticity. He is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation fellow and recipient of the 2017 Cogan Award for his discoveries in the study of vision. Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford Medicine has been consistently published in top journals including Nature, Science, and Cell.
According to Huberman, a simple breathing technique to reduce stress and anxiety is to do a double inhale, followed by an exhale. The reason it works so well to relax us is because it offloads a lot of carbon dioxide all at once. Our lungs are not just two big bags of air, we actually have millions of little of sacks of air that if we were to lay them out flat they would be as big as about a tennis court. The volume of air therefore and the volume of carbon dioxide that we can offload is tremendously high, except that we get stressed as carbon dioxide builds up in our bloodstream and as kind of a “double whammy” these little sacks deflate.
The breathing technique is to do a double inhale (works best through your nose) in the form of a strong inhale, followed by another small inhale, to sneak the last bit of air into your lungs at the very end. When you do that you reinflate all these little sacks in the lungs, and when you exhale (recommended through your mouth) you discard all the carbon dioxide at once.
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