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This exercise should succeed in bringing your stress triggers—the ones that elicit such a strong response that your sympathetic nervous system enters (or becomes stuck in) fight-or-flight mode—to the forefront of your attention so you can start to recognize and manage them in real time. Tell me . . . did you notice any of the following common physiological reactions?
Heart Breath Mind
Leah Lagos
A case report published in the journal Biofeedback detailed the experience of a 21-year-old woman with severe IBS. Diagnosed in her teens, she suffered excessive weight loss and depression. Her doctor told her it was incurable and offered morphine as her consolation prize. Lying in her hospital bed one day, she started scrolling on her phone and happened upon a link to something called diaphragmatic breathing. She tried it immediately. “While practicing, she could feel her stomach and abdomen becoming warmer,” the researchers wrote—a sign that she was switching from fight-or-flight mode to rest-and-digest and increasing blood flow throughout her body. She cried tears of joyful surprise. This was the first time she’d been pain-free in years. The authors report that the patient ultimately experienced a near-disappearance of IBS symptoms with continued practice.
Heart Breath Mind
Leah Lagos
He explained that the first step to improving airway obstruction wasn’t orthodontics but instead involved maintaining correct “oral posture.” Anyone could do this, and it was free. It just meant holding the lips together, teeth lightly touching, with your tongue on the roof of the mouth. Hold the head up perpendicular to the body and don’t kink the neck. When sitting or standing, the spine should form a J-shape—perfectly straight until it reaches the small of the back, where it naturally curves outward. While maintaining this posture, we should always breathe slowly through the nose into the abdomen. Our bodies and airways are designed to work best in this posture, both Mews agreed. Look at any Greek statue, or a drawing by Leonardo, or an ancient portrait. Everyone shared this J-shape. But if we look around public spaces today, it’s obvious that most people have shoulders hunched forward, neck extended outward, and an S-shaped spine. “A bunch of village idiots, that’s what we’ve become,” shouted Mike. He then assumed this “idiot” position, inhaled a few short, puffy, open-mouth breaths, and looked around dumbly. “It’s bloody killing us!” Many of us adopted this S-posture not because of laziness but because our tongues don’t fit properly in our too-small mouths. Having nowhere else to go, the tongue falls back into the throat, creating a mild suffocation. At night, we choke and cough, attempting to push air in and out of this obstructed airway. This, of course, is sleep apnea, and a quarter of Americans suffer from it. By day, we unconsciously attempt to open our obstructed airways by sloping our shoulders, craning our necks forward, and tilting our heads up. “Think of someone who is unconscious and about to receive CPR,” Mike said. The first thing a medic does is tilt the head back to open the throat. We’ve adopted this CPR posture all the time. Our bodies hate this position. The weight of the sloping head stresses the back muscles, leading to back pain; the kink in our necks adds pressure to the brain stem, triggering headaches and other neurological problems; the tilted angle of our faces stretches the skin down from the eyes, thins the upper lip, pulls flesh down on the nasal bone. Because “the village idiot stare” doesn’t sound scientific, Mike calls this posture “cranial dystrophy.” He claims it affects about 50 percent of the modern population, including Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.
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