Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
Slow and deep breathing does suppress sympathetic activity, but unless you do it systematically, it won’t strengthen the parasympathetic branch at your baseline state. That’s where the braking action happens, thanks to something called the baroreflex. The baroreflex is one of the body’s mechanisms for maintaining blood pressure. Receptors located in the walls of arteries trigger this reflex. Every time you inhale, your heart rate increases, followed by a rise in blood pressure approximately 4 or 5 seconds later. When you exhale, your heart rate slows, this time followed by a drop in blood pressure approximately 4 or 5 seconds later. This cycle is mediated by specialized receptors in the walls of your aorta and carotid arteries called baroreceptors. The baroreflex is fixed and almost entirely mediated by unconscious mechanisms, but we do have control over our breathing rate. Most of us breathe at a faster frequency than our baroreflex, but when we purposefully slow our breathing to match the frequency of our baroreflex, we strengthen our control over it. It turns out there is a particular rate of breathing, called resonance frequency, that maximizes the amplitudes of heart rate oscillations. For some people, it’s 6 breaths a minute; for others it might be 5 or 7. Regardless of the specific number, when you breathe at this rate, something amazing happens: it strengthens the baroreflex, creating even greater overall increases in HRV. When you are stressed, your heart rate and breathing rate fall out of alignment, propelling you into a state of dissonance. But when you breathe at your resonance frequency, your heart rate oscillations become perfectly in phase with your breath. You enter a state called resonance, or flow. As you train your heart by breathing at your personal resonance frequency, you are exercising your baroreflex, making it stronger and more efficient so that your HRV remains high even when you resume normal breathing. Breathing at resonance frequency improves your baseline stress response and trains your body to reflexively kick into a state of resonance, even during moments of stress.
Heart Breath Mind
Leah Lagos
Wendell explains that my pain feels like it’s in the present, but it’s actually in both the past and the future. Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present—how our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. If we don’t accept the notion that there’s no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck. Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past. In fact, Wendell continues, I’ve lost more than my relationship in the present. I’ve lost my relationship in the future. We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret. By Google-stalking Boyfriend, I’ve been watching his future unfold while I stay frozen in the past. But if I live in the present, I’ll have to accept the loss of my future.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Lori Gottlieb
The Odysseus myth highlights a key feature of behavior change: Recounting our experiences gives us mastery over them. Whether in the context of psychotherapy, talking to an AA sponsor, confessing to a priest, confiding in a friend, or writing in a journal, our honest disclosure brings our behavior into relief, allowing us in some cases to see it for the first time. This is especially true for behaviors that involve a level of automaticity outside of conscious awareness.
Dopamine Nation
Anna Lembke
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise