This breathing technique is more effective for increasing resilience than meditation

Asked what advice he would give his 25-year-old self, health and performance expert Prof. Andrew Huberman's answer was simple.

To handle stress better.

I can almost hear you thinking about spending additional time on vacations, doing spa treatments more regularly, or developing an elaborate meditation routine.

Yet, according to research by Huberman and others, the most effective ways for better handling stress fall into two very different categories: Decreasing stress in real-time and increasing one's “stress threshold”.

As I've described over the last two weeks, getting into panoramic vision and exhale-emphasized breathing are the quickest and most effective ways for decreasing stress in real-time. 

This and next week, I'll introduce some highly effective practices for the second category around increasing one's “stress threshold” – which is more colloquially known as resilience. 

The basic idea of these practices is simple: By self-inducing the stress response in a controlled environment, we can train our minds to be more comfortable with stress.

In other words, when we flood our brain and body with the stress hormone adrenaline deliberately and briefly, we can learn to remain calmer when real-life stressors hit. The first practice for pulling that off is all about inhale-emphasized breathing.

While exhale-emphasized breathing triggers your calmness system, inhale-emphasized breathing does the exact opposite: It strongly activates your alertness system so that you can learn to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

Surprisingly for some, both exhale-emphasized and inhale-emphasized breathing are more effective than meditation for handling stress.

A very effective inhale-emphasized breathing practice is cyclic hyperventilation, which is similar to the breathing method popularized by Dutch extreme athlete Wim Hof (pictured above).

Here's how to do cyclic hyperventilation:

1. Inhale deeply through the nose, and then exhale by passively letting the air "fall out from the mouth". Do 30 breaths (in and out) in this manner.

2. After completing the 30 breaths, exhale all your air through the mouth – and then calmly wait with your lungs empty for 15 seconds.

Once you've completed a full cycle (of both step 1 and step 2), go for two additional cycles – for a total of three. According to Huberman, doing so at least three times per week will quickly improve your ability to deal with all kinds of stressors.

Pro tip: You can not only use cyclic hyperventilation to raise your stress threshold. Since it makes you more alert, the practice is also great for waking you up – when you're having trouble getting going in the morning, say, or whenever you're more sleepy than you would want to be during the day.

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Until next week,
Christian