Today, we’re going to talk about lowering blood pressure, utilizing alternate nostril breathing or alternative nostril breathing. February is the month in the United States where the American Heart Association tries to increase awareness about heart disease. Heart disease is a I guess a big interest of mine because it basically has killed everyone in my family.
I don’t mean to say that lightly, but I lost my parents to it. Most of my aunts and uncles. So heart disease has always been this big discussion kind of in my family and we have seen the typical symptom patterns that emerge as people get older a lot of it’s down to diet. Not taking care of themselves and exercise etc. But strokes, heart attacks, and all of that typically accompanied with hypertension.
Hypertension obviously is a huge concern for so many people. And so what we’re going to do for the rest of the month of February, is we’re going to give you some different brain based ideas and approaches that are showing some decent evidence in the research for assisting in lowering blood pressure.
If you are new to Z-Health, we’re a brain based education company. We basically deal with movement professionals, doctors, physical therapists, personal trainers, movement coaches from around the world. But one thing that we know is that everything in the body is responsive to brain-based training to some degree.
So we always try to provide information that might assist people along with their typical medical treatments in getting better results. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. And the focus is going to be on alternative or alternate nostril breathing.
So whenever you look into this, this is a very old practice. It is a yogic practice. Most people will be familiar with it from that. I was exposed to it many, many years ago via martial arts. And the basic idea is really simple. You start off, you close one nostril. So in this particular case, I’m going to use my my thumb. I’m gonna close my right nostril. I’m going to take a nice, deep, long breath in my left nostril. I’m then going to close my left nostril and exhale through my right. I’ll now maintain the pressure on the left.
Full deep inhale through the right. Close off the Right Long exhale through the left. Not complicated. It’s just a really simple pattern of you doing unilateral nostril breathing. Now, why in the world would we think that this might help with regulating blood pressure? Well, what we know from research in the neural world is that nostril breathing influence the autonomic nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system is the big overarching term we give to the sympathetic, your fight or flight, and your parasympathetic, your rest and digest nervous systems. That’s how most people will refer to them and blood pressure control is directly related to autonomic nervous system coordination and function in the rest of the body.
So if we can find ways to stimulate and in essence kind of relax and overactive autonomic nervous system in many cases, that’s what we need to do. we can see a lowering of blood pressure. Now, is there evidence behind this? I will say yes, the evidence is there. It is small right now. It is becoming, it is beginning to accumulate more.
What we’ve seen, we’ve seen some research studies looking at alternate nostril breathing in young, healthy adults without hypertension. What they found was that 10 minutes a day of practicing this improved four different respiratory parameters. So it actually improved lung function in those young adults who did not have hypertension.
There’s now studies looking at, can we use alternate nostril breathing for people with resistant hypertension? There’s been some, there was a couple of case studies that have come out, a couple of smaller studies. So we don’t have a huge amount of data right now, but we are seeing some really positive results.
And in the, the studies that I actually found most interesting, they were looking, there were case studies. one particularly was looking at someone with resistant hypertension. Resistant hypertension means that it’s very tough to control, even with. a wide variety of medications. So in this particular, case, they found that having the patient practice alternate nostril breathing twice a day for 10 minutes, so a total of 20 minutes per day, for four weeks, at the end of the four week, intervention, systolic blood pressure had dropped almost 20 points and diastolic, which is your lower number, had dropped 11 points, which is phenomenally good, right?
Now that may be individualized to that person, but then we’ve seen some other studies where we’re seeing somewhere around 10 to 12 point drops in systolic and around 8 to 9 point drops in diastolic over a period of four to six weeks when we do about 20 minutes a day of the alternate nostril breathing.
So the evidence is there. Like I said, it’s small, it’s accumulating, but it is encouraging. And here’s what’s cool about it. It’s cheap. Costs nothing. You can teach it to anyone. Doesn’t depend on your economic status, your educational status. All you have to do is sit down, try to relax and do alternate nostril breathing
for 10 minutes, at least once a day. Hopefully twice a day, and then track your results. That’s one of the wonderful things about brain-based training. Whenever we start dealing with your neurology, there’s going to be individualized responses, which is great, but think about this. The best medications currently available will often offer a six point drop in systolic blood pressure.
And if you have resistant hypertension, you may have to be on four or five, six different medications. My son is finishing, about to finish his first year of residency in internal medicine, and we talk about hypertension a lot. Our last conversation, he’s like, dad, he goes, it is. Uh, he said, it’s so good that we have like databases that we can call on.
He said, just talking about hypertension, he goes, I think there’s 108 medications that I could potentially use just for hypertension. So it is not a condition that has one solution. And what we want to do is offer things that can add an additional benefit to the medical management. So give alternate nostril breathing a try.
I think it’s a really, really powerful tool. Plus. It is incredibly relaxing, because it requires you to focus a little bit, requires you to take some time out of your day, and that’s probably good for your blood pressure anyway. All right. If you have any thoughts, questions, let us know. Otherwise, we encourage you if you are a, a professional interested in education, make sure to subscribe to the channel and sign up for our free mini course.
You can find out a lot more about what we do, not only in the movement world, but also how we apply all this stuff to things like blood pressure. All right, have a great week.
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