20 minute breathing excercise for calmness and vagus nerve stimulation.

[Going less Crazy]

I've found a particularly helpful breathing exercise that's been helping me calm down and improve sleep quality.  I am now trying to do this nightly and find it works better on me than many breathing exercises.  Many people have said that yoga and such helps them so this may also be beneficial.

1) Set timer to 20 minutes

2) Get in a relaxing position (I like cross legged upright)

3) Right when you press start hold your breath until the timer (counting up) gets to as close to 1 minute as you can.

4) Exhale, breath normally and rub your temples for 30 seconds up until 1:30.

5) From 1:30 to 2:00 stop rubbing temples and just breath normally.

6) At 2:00 take another deep breath and hold it until 3:00, as close as you can get.

You should be able to hold for a minute the longer you do this

Just repeat this process for 20 minutes and it really relaxes you and is supposed to stimulate vagus nerve (releasing antiinflammatory messages).  I find it really helps me sleep and calms me down.

[Prancer]

Very nice thanks. I'll give it a try, and I'm glad it helps to calm you down and gets you to sleep faster. I'll try it with my normal bedtime relax routine since getting a better, more restful sleep is very good for my proper thinking ability the next day, as I've mentioned before. Btw, when I first read it I thought you were going to say to hold your breath until the timer goes off (all 20 mins lol). That would get me to sleep, permanently though ha. Good plan, maybe a vid version next time, but this is a very good description. I'm starting to like breathing exercises for sleep.

[Going less Crazy]

Lol I remember my roommate made me try to do this thing.  It's where you breathe really fast for some time, stand up and I won't say the rest just because someone might mistakenly try it lol.  But you literally pass out for a good ten seconds or so.  I did it and fell backwards onto the floor and was out for ten seconds, my roommate was a d**k and didn't catch me.  But it was a very blissful state.  But yeah this exercise works pretty good in my experience (the one described in my first post).