Cool Down With the Right Breathing Exercises
Feeling hot? You’re not alone. In fact, most of the nation has been held in the grip of a scorching summer heatwave for weeks. But yoga and meditation teacher Travis Eliot, cofounder of Inner Dimension TV, wants you to take a deep breath—a few deep breaths, actually. Not only can doing a few breathing exercises help calm you down mentally, but it can also help naturally decrease your body temperature so you feel cooler too.
Eliot, who was first introduced to meditation at the age of 9, is the expert you want on your side when it comes to feel-good breathing exercises. After facing several near-death experiences—including almost drowning and surviving the Thailand tsunami in 2004—Eliot came back to yoga and meditation, leaning on these two practices—both of which are deeply connected to breathwork—to center himself once again. But can his work and techniques actually change your body’s temperature? According to science, it just might.
“It is possible for core body temperature to be controlled by the brain,” scientists from the National University of Singapore shared in a study published in the journal PLOS ONE, which focused on breathing techniques to warm the body. “[We] found that core body temperature increases can be achieved using certain meditation techniques, which could help in boosting immunity to fight infectious diseases or immunodeficiency.”
Excerpted from Real Simple
