Dr. Michael Gervais

And you might even do box breathing after a workout, which is a little bit harder.

You might do box breathing when you're emotionally charged, which would be even harder to do.

So again, you were stacking the intensity both in time, the four-second units versus the five-second units, and doing it in close proximity to an elevated heart rate.

That would be kind of levels up.

And the reason we do box breathing is to enhance focus, first and foremost, and then you get a nice little gold dust of relaxation.

But it's really a focus training.

That's one bucket.

And we're going to stay on breathing, which there's other tools as well.

The second bucket is what's called down regulation.

So we're going to work on relaxing through this one.

So the primary objective is to relax.

And for every unit inhale you have, you have double the units of the exhale.

So if you breathe in for five seconds, you would have a small pause, like a half a second pause at the top with a 10 second exhale and a half a second pause at the bottom.

12 of those in a row has been said to reset the rest and digest system in our brain and body.

So it starts to get us into that more relaxed state, right?

For the science-friendly folks, it's the parasympathetic nervous system that would be activated at that point, the rest and digest system.

So that's about after 12 breaths of a down regulation sequence.

And then the third is to build capacity.

It's to, on design, stress you out, to create an acute stressor where you have to work with yourself in this highly stressed environment.

So that type of breathing protocol is like this.