Dr. Mickra Hamilton is one of the co-founders of the Apeiron Center for Human Potential at the Apeiron Academy, and a colonel and human performance subject matter expert in the United States Air Force Reserve Command. She is a “human systems designer,” and creative disruptor in the field of epigenetic human performance coaching creating a new paradigm for what is possible for human flourishing.
What advice would you give to people who would like to regulate their overbreathing?
Firstly, it would be to measure and evaluate themselves. They can take a timer and count how many breaths per minute they breathe, and I would do it a couple of different times because the breath is so dynamic, it changes in every situation. You would need to look at it a couple of times a day to check – for example, when you wake up, and when you are in a high-stress situation. Secondly, you would look at what the position of your breath is. Are you breathing diaphragmatically, gently in the belly or high in the chest? Are you moving energy into your shoulders creating tension in your trapezius muscles, up your neck and into your head? Tension headaches occur from this a lot, migraines also. So first assess speed, then the position (of breathing). Are you breathing through your mouth or through your nose? Because we are designed to ideally function when we breathe through the nose. This is for nitric oxide, which is essential for many processes in the body. It warms up the air from the outside. It's our biggest immune system filter.
When we're breathing through the mouth, we don't have any of those things happening. If you want to try it, you can breathe in through your mouth, and feel what happens in your body. When you breathe in through your mouth, it is your chest that expands. You're not getting the diaphragmatic breath that is ideal for the human system. So when you breathe in through your nose, air actually goes down into working the way the diaphragm is designed to work.
How much volume is going in? This would be the final thing that I would evaluate and ask - is my whole system opening or the opposite, expanding? Am I taking in too much volume?
When people use the Masters’ Breath technique, you can’t tell when they're breathing. You look at them, their energy spectrum and their physiology are quiet and you say, are they even alive? Like a baby when we say is the baby breathing? They're so quiet. That is the ideal way to breathe when you can’t actually see the breath. The breath is silent. You hear a lot of people, they breathe in, and they make a noise when they exhale. And what this is doing is putting on the veil break. So the vagus nerve, it's breaking that by creating more parasympathetic or relaxation activation. A lot of people form a pattern where they have a longer audible exhale but the system is designed to breathe sinusoidally, where you inhale and exhale at the same speed. You inhale for five seconds, exhale for five seconds and inhale for five seconds. And it's a gentle inhale that barely moves the system. Generally, the movement ideally is between the sternum and the belly button. But it's so small. The lungs don't move. And it's quite a beautiful, effortless process. One of the Buddhist masters said, “Be like a water snake smooth and gliding with the breath as opposed to a stallion galloping and creating much noise”. That's my paraphrase.
It's a great way to evaluate your system because the minute you are aware of what your system is doing, you have access to be able to shift that system by taking action and retraining that innate breathing nature and it doesn't take long. It's remarkable how quickly the system remembers how to be its natural self.
We are designed to ideally function when we breathe through the nose. This is for nitric oxide, which is essential for many processes in the body.
You mentioned that the inhale and exhale should have the same time length, and what's interesting is that in a biohacking community, and a lot of self-improvement people are proposing, that to stimulate the vagus nerve you should actually, exhale for longer. So people are suggesting the three-seven system where you inhale for three seconds and exhale for seven, and they explain that by saying that by doing this you press the vagus nerve for longer.
Yes and that's absolutely true. Here's the question to ask: why am I doing what I'm doing? If my only goal, if I'm in a state of high stress, is to slow my system down, that's the exact strategy I'm going to use. I'm going to increase my exhale time so that my body is sent a signal to push on the brakes to activate the parasympathetic relaxation response. And this is what is so critical, is knowing why I'm using which breath for which purpose. That's a great way to decrease stress. What if we get in a position where we don’t need to decrease stress all the time? This is where it goes back to that sinusoidal breath. What cultivates coherence in the body? That's the four to five seconds in and four to five seconds out, because it is created when you lock the heart rate - so I breathe in, my heart rate goes up, I breathe out - my heart rate goes down. When I lock my heart rate and my breath together in those sixish breaths per minute, that's ideal for the optimal state. All of the core veins around the heart entrain to it, the brain goes to an alpha place, which is a sort of open state. So they are in a silent sphere, it’s the Schumann resonance (SR), which also equals alpha in the brain. So now we align them for its coherence, which also matches the coherence of the ionosphere of the planet. So there's no surprise that we're in touch with the earth.
There are other breathing strategies too, so if you want to energetically boost your system, you might do Breath of Fire so you can go into all the yogic traditions and you can pull out at least 20 different strategies and they're all designed to do very specific things: enhance consciousness, create access to greater performance, what is the purpose? Then how do I take that strategy and use it effectively? For us, it's using it effectively with validation.
I worked with a protégé of Wim Hof and he was stunned and in disbelief that he was moderately hypocapnic in a baseline state. He said, “this can't be true because I know this is benefiting me” and I said, “well I recognize that your perception is that it's benefiting you, but the actual data shows that you're programmed in this state of hypocapnia”. So he was quite shocked and worked with it and was able to rebalance his system, and not everyone does ideally with the different strategies. That's why it's important for every one of us to know we do well with the strategy that we've chosen to use? That's the ultimate biohacking. You get to prove and validate beyond just your perception that it's actually making a really great benefit for you.
People should be careful when using different strategies, if they don't have a measurement or the possibility to measure the effect.
Let me add a caveat to that by saying that there are people who are so introspective with their system that they know intuitively whether a strategy is benefiting them or not. That's a certain segment of smaller segments of the biohacking total. Those people know exactly how to course-correct. They know what’s off, why it's off and they’re simply laying down new strategies. The majority of people don't have that level of introspection to truly know because the feedback is that something's off in which case, the strategies are not ideal. So which strategies are not ideal? It's a case of taking that complex system, that we talked about and refining each of the interactions of that system-validation in our model. Because that makes sense to us - if we can validate it, it certainly gives us that next step toward the next state.
Thank you so much for talking to us.
