Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode.
And if you're out there and you wanna create the perfect morning routine, you can go to theperfectmorningroutine.com right now, and you can get my free guide and video and checklist of exactly how to create the perfect morning routine for you based off of science. So once again, it's theperfectmorningroutine.com.
Today, I'm going to be talking about something kind of odd, and it is how the simple act of humming can change your entire life. Because have you ever caught yourself humming without really thinking about it? Maybe you're in the shower, maybe you're driving, maybe you're just on a walk alone.
If you have, I want you to understand what's happening is that your brain and your nervous system in that moment are doing something incredibly sophisticated without you even realizing it. You are unconsciously de-stressing yourself and setting your body back to normal. And when you hum, a few things happen. You activate your vagus nerve, your body releases nitric oxide,
your brain waves actually change and your emotional regulation pathways activate inside of your body. And so today we're gonna go really deep into what actually happens, not just like, oh, humming will relax you.
We're gonna talk about your neurology around this, your biology around it, your nervous system regulation, and why even just 60 seconds of humming can literally change your internal state multiple times a day if you need it to. So if you've listened to this podcast before, you know I talk about doing breath work every single day. I recommend doing breath work as much as you possibly can.
And when you breathe out, I always recommend humming on the exhale. Let me tell you where I got this from. So when my wife was pregnant, And she was like deep into pregnancy and she was in pain. She was in her third trimester. She started humming. It was just like a natural, intuitive thing. And she started talking about how it relaxes her and how it makes her whole body feel so much better.
And, you know, I believe that pregnant women are in touch like more than any other people on earth. And I was like, I'm going to do some research and see what this whole humming thing is about. So I did a ton of research on it. And, you know, I've been doing it since that moment when I realized how great it is. And I'll tell you how great it is today.
I have been doing it with my son since he was born. And what's wild is that sometimes he'll sit on my chest. He started at about 18 months to sit on my chest and he'll actually hum himself when he's just hanging out, just sitting down.
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Chapter 2: What is the surprising benefit of humming in daily life?
And so I want to talk about what's happening in your body when you do this. And first I want to start with the brain, okay? When you hum, you're doing something very specific neurologically to yourself. You're creating rhythmic, self-generated sound. And your brain loves rhythm. Why is that?
Because rhythm is one of the fastest ways to stabilize neural firing patterns, to synchronize different parts of your brain regions, and to actually reduce the chaotic signaling, aka anxiety that's happening inside of your brain. There's actually research using EEG scans showing that vocal toning such as humming and chanting increases alpha waves in your brain. Alpha waves are super important.
They are associated with relaxed alertness, creativity, and also meditative states as well. So basically, it's that feeling of like, I'm calm, but I'm also very focused and very present. That's what alpha waves are. And here's where it really starts to get deeper when you look at it. Humming also stimulates the limbic system in your brain. That's your emotional brain.
That includes your amygdala, which is where your fears and your threat detection comes from. It includes your hippocampus, which is your memory and emotional context. And so when you hum, you're basically sending signals to your brain that say, we're safe. And the brain responds by downregulating your fear responses. Wouldn't that be nice for a lot of people, right?
Reducing your hypervigilance and decreasing emotional reactivity. All of this is really huge when you really look at it because most people are walking around nowadays with low-grade threat mode on all day long. Their amygdala is just a little bit scared, and it's kind of like a little bit of fight or flight all day long.
And you're just unconsciously trying to protect yourself all of the time, and they don't even really realize it. And so they have this anxiety that kind of just is a thread from the moment that they wake up to the moment they go to bed, humming.
can literally change that for people within 60 to 90 seconds now if we go into actually a layer deeper into this humming isn't just a sound it's actually controlled exhalation so this is where your nervous system really starts to shift with controlled exhalation the exhale is everything to your body. Your nervous system has two main branches inside of your nervous system.
There is the sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight, and there's also your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your calm, your rest, your digest, your heal. And the thing that most people don't realize when you look at this is that you don't necessarily just activate calm by thinking calm thoughts.
You can, but it takes kind of a long time to turn that part of your brain off that's going, you know, that's anxious and actually get the part of your brain that's calm. The fastest way to activate calm inside of your body, inside of your nervous system, is by simply lengthening your exhale to take control of the body. And so your humming forces that.
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Chapter 3: How does humming affect your brain and nervous system?
Humming is a signal. Think about this for instance, right? You have to understand like just thinking about it this way. No animal that is running for its life and trying to protect itself from a predator is humming while doing it, right? Humming is a relaxation thing. If you think about even just a cat, a cat purring, when does a cat purr? When it is the most relaxed.
That is basically the exact same thing. And that stimulates the cat's vagus nerve, which then relaxes them even more. And so another thing that's really cool is when you actually hum, is humming increases your nitric oxide production inside of your sinuses by up to 15 times. Not 15%, 15 times. This is based off of studies from the Karolinska Institute.
And so nitric oxide is a gas that your body produces that helps dilate your blood vessels. So that helps blood and... Oxygen and everything move through your body even better. It improves your oxygen delivery It supports your immune function and it regulates inflammation.
So when you hum airflow vibrates through your sinuses Nitric oxide releases dramatically into your body, which means that you now have better oxygen uptake That's really good for you better brain function. That's pretty good for you as well and improves cellular signaling so In 60 seconds, literally 60 seconds of humming, you're not just calming yourself down.
You're literally improving your oxygenation in your body. You're boosting your circulation and you're supporting immune health as well. Sounds pretty good to me, right? All right, so let's talk the psychology behind all of this stuff as well, because there's also a reason why humming feels safe for you. Humming actually mimics early developmental regulation. So think about this.
When a baby is stressed, What do the caretakers usually do? They usually rock them. That's a rhythmic thing. They usually hum to them or they will sing to them and use some sort of rhythmic sound when doing this. So think about this. When a baby is in the womb, what do all sounds sound like to them? muffled sounds, they kind of sound like hums.
And so that rhythm from literally being in the womb starts to become associated with safety, with connection, with regulation, because when do we, as humans, through our entire life, when are we the most safe? When are we the most connected? usually inside of the womb. So when you hum as an adult, you're essentially self-soothing. And self-soothing is something that we all need to get better at.
You're recreating a regulatory pattern from early in life to the point where literally before you were born in the womb and when your mother was holding you when you were stressed out and you were crying and she was singing to you or she was humming to you, you're basically telling your nervous system, we're safe. And that allows your nervous system to calm down.
And this ties into something that I talk about a lot is that most people aren't struggling because life is hard. Most people are struggling because their nervous system is extremely dysregulated and they've never been taught how to actually regulate their nervous system. And so humming gives you a way to regulate without needing anything external outside of you.
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