The second breathing technique we're going to look at is alternate nostril breathing. alternate nostril breathing is a wonderful breathing technique to help you improve your focus and concentration to improve long and respiratory function helps to eliminate toxins and lower stress. And it's a wonderful way to create harmony or balance between the right and left hemispheres of your brain. It also helps you to hit the reset button for your mental health. If you have a project or a presentation to give, or maybe a difficult conversation with somebody, you may want to try alternate nostril breathing. Now let's take a look at how we perform alternate nostril breathing.

I'm basing this along the guidelines of the Deepak Chopra center. I'm first going to talk us through alternate nostril breathing and then I'll actually perform it so When we begin alternate nostril breathing, we're going to use our right hand and our active fingers are going to be our thumb and our ring finger is what the Deepak Chopra center likes to use. I personally like to use my thumb and my pinky finger. So it's really a matter of preference. The more important thing is the breathing technique. So again, just to talk us through it, when you're doing any sort of breathing technique, you first want to do a few warm up breaths, just as if we went to the gym, we wouldn't just start exercising, hopefully, we would warm up.

So we're going to begin by just normal breathing. Do the alternate nostril breathing approach or any breathing technique, and then return to normal breathing. So when doing alternate nostril breathing, we're going to close off our right nostril and inhale through the left nostril. Pause, close off the left nostril. Exhale through the right nostril. Pause.

Inhale through the right nostril pause, close off the right nostril and exhale through the left nostril. That's considered one cycle. So again to review, we're going to close off the right nostril. Inhale through the left paws, close off the left nostril. Exhale through the right. Pause, inhale through the right, pause, close off the right nostril and exhale through the left.

That's considered again, one cycle. The Deepak Chopra center recommends that we do five to 10 cycles, but it's really a matter of personal preference. The whole idea or goal is to calm down your nervous system to come back into harmony and into balance. All the breathing obviously is done in and out of our nose. So the way that this looks, I'm going to demonstrate by doing five cycles now important part Have any breathing technique is consistency. So what you want to try to do is to make your inhales your pauses and your exhales be the same count.

So for instance, I could count for an inhale for four, hold for four, and then exhale for four. And pause for for the number again is arbitrary. It's whatever is comfortable for you. So let's begin. And I'm going to begin by just taking some normal breathing techniques, and then we'll go into alternate nostril breathing.