Month: November 2018

Brain Over Body – Inner Workings of The Inner Fire

 

I’ve been training in adaptation to both hot and cold for several years (each one has particular benefits to health, and performance), but it wasn’t until this past October that I attended a formal workshop on the material with the Art of Breath coach Rob Wilson. Although I had done Wim Hof’s 10 Week Course, I wasn’t completely happy with it. I felt that there were “secrets” missing from the material, some of which I uncovered by accident, in Scott Carney’s book “What Doesn’t Kill Us”.

The workshop with Rob Wilson was a good experience on many levels, the most important of which was just validating my experience with training cold exposure up to now, and also helped clarify my experience with the Wim Hof online course; compared to deep meditation methods like Vipassana or Zen which are meant to completely overhaul your mental “operating system”, cold exposure practice is really so simple, there’s not much “how to” to talk about, just do it, and nature pretty much handles the rest over time. The keys are a little bit of intent, and controlling your breathing to manage your physiological state.

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A post shared by Ashe Higgs, Pn2 (@ashehiggs) on Oct 7, 2018 at 3:35pm PDT

Recently I posted about a review paper that detailed some of the relationships between breathing exercises and improvements in immune function and now, we have some more exciting new findings in regards to respiration / breathing exercises and cold exposure from Wayne State University as part of exerting active control over normally autonomic functions in the body. The study is titled “Brain over body”–A study on the willful regulation of autonomic function during cold exposure Here are a few highlights from the study

•  fMRI analyses indicated that the WHM activates primary control centers for descending pain/cold stimuli modulation in the periaqueductal gray (PAG)
• The periaqueductal gray (PAG), also known as the central gray, constitutes a cell dense region surrounding the midbrain aqueduct.
• In addition, the WHM also engages higher-order cortical areas (left anterior and right middle insula) that are uniquely associated with self-reflection, and which facilitate both internal focus and sustained attention in the presence of averse (e.g. cold) external stimuli.

I think one of the more interesting findings from the study was that BAT, or brown fat, played a negligible role in generating heat to maintain core temperature during cold exposure, but instead the muscles of the rib cage, the intercostals, played the chief role by burning massive amounts of glucose.
This helps add some understanding to my own experience with the practice, which is that anytime I’m sleep deprived, or in a fasted state I have a much more difficult time resisting the cold compared to when I’m fed, and rested.

I commonly fast two days a week, and the first three or four days of every month. In a fasted state, core temp drops a bit anyway, and my system may not yet be fat adapted well enough to efficiently keep up with the higher demand for blood sugar through gluconeogenesis. (I suspect this is true, as I still have not recovered 100% of my exercise performance since switching to a ketogenic diet in June of this year). There was also a recent study done that showed blood ketone levels above 2.0 (which wouldn’t be uncommon during fasting) basically results in “ketone resistance”.

 Similarly, cortisol levels are high, and you’re naturally more insulin resistant when sleep deprived, so again, this could potentially play a role in not being able to keep up with the glucose demands of the “inner fire” practice.

If you’d like a  nice animated synopsis of the study and the results, the official Wim Hof YouTube channel released a nice video about it.

 

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References 1. “Brain over body”–A study on the willful regulation of autonomic function during cold exposure
Author links open overlay panelOttoMuzik
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811918300673?via%3Dihub

The Science Behind Qigong For Health

The old masters discovered centuries ago that deep breathing practices like qigong and pranayama lead to long life and abundant health. I teach several of these traditional qigong sets as part of our local martial arts classes here in Tempe, AZ, including a variation of yijinjing 易筋經 unique to I Liq Chuan, as well as a qigong for health set taught by GM Sam Chin and the “five contemplations of breathing” taught by Venerable Jiru of the Mid-America Buddhist Association.

Possible Benefits of Qi Gong For Health

A new review article recently published in Frontiers in Psychiatry [1] reveals some mechanisms behind such practices and their applications in treating mental and physical disorders like anxiety, depression, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and Crohn’s disease.

At over 15 pages and full of scientific jargon, the original review paper is quite long and dense for many readers, so I’ll summarize some of the more critical details below. Even as a summary, I’m going to break this post up into multiple parts:

Part 1: some basic anatomy
Part 2: The Immune system

Basic Anatomy

The human gut has an estimated 100-500 million neurons; this is more neurons than the spine. It’s the most significant accumulation of nerve cells in the human body. Often referred to as “the second brain,” it is more appropriately referred to as the enteric nervous system. Well-known author of martial arts and qigong books, Yang, Jwingming, has been writing about this since at least the 90s.

The enteric nervous system produces more than 30 neurotransmitters and communicates directly with the brain (and vice versa) via the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve originates in the brain stem and extends downward through the torso connecting to all the major organs, including the brain, heart, liver, lungs, and the gut. Due to its length and complexity, it’s called “the wandering nerve” (vagus means wandering in Latin).

The Gut-Brain Axis

This “two-lane highway” between gut and brain via the vagus nerve is referred to as the gut-brain axis or GBA.

From an “Eastern” point of view, the body tissues can be divided into yin and yang types like flexors and extensors in the muscles or arteries and veins in the circulatory system. Nerves are similarly divided into two different fiber types: afferent (long “A” like hay) and efferent (long “E” like feel) fibers.

Afferent fibers bring information from the point of contact (stimulus) back to the brain and central nervous system. In contrast, efferent fibers carry information from the CNS back to the other end of the system. You could say that afferent fibers bring information “from out-to-in,” while efferent fibers bring information “from in-to-out.”

A whopping 90% of the nerve fibers in the vagus are afferent fibers, bringing detailed information about the gut and the state of its internal environment back to the brain, then to the brain stem and limbic system (more on this later). In comparison, the remaining 10% of fibers are efferent, communicating information about our external environment and mental state back to the gut. This intimate connection explains why you feel moody when you’ve eaten the wrong foods or why you get butterflies in your stomach when you get nervous.

How Qigong Works – Slow Breathing

So that you don’t forget to do important things like breathe, say, after you fall asleep, by default, respiration (breathing) is hardwired into the autonomic nervous system. However, being able to speed up or slow down our breathing voluntarily is an ability we all possess. (As a side note, I recently heard about a condition in which people lose the autonomic function and basically can’t sleep anymore. Every time they try to fall asleep, they wake up because they quit breathing and eventually die of sleep deprivation!)

The nervous system can be divided into two main parts, the voluntary (somatic) nervous system and the autonomic nervous system, which can be again divided into the enteric nervous system, the sympathetic (fight or flight), and the parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system. The vagus nerve is the primary regulator of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. To make a rough analogy, if the nervous system were your house and the autonomic nervous system your central heating, the vagus nerve would be the thermostat.

As you may have guessed by now, breathing practices can directly stimulate the vagus nerve by increasing the vagal tone, leading to an improvement in autonomic regulation, clarity of thought, improved mood, and ability to cope with stress.

Heart Rate Variability & Vagal Tone

Simple breathing exercises seem to restore vagal tone, at least in part, through heart rate variability.

Each of us naturally has a different heart rate between the inhale and exhale, as well as from beat to beat. When you inhale, the heart rate speeds up a bit, and when you exhale, the heart rate goes down.

Good heart rate variability indicates that you’re in a relaxed state, whereas poor variability indicates a stressed, sympathetic state. So by slowing down the number of breaths we take in a minute and focusing on making the exhale longer than the inhale, we naturally cause the heart rate to drop, which restores vagal tone and increases relaxation as we shift from a sympathetic into a more parasympathetic state. Once in the parasympathetic state, the gut then upregulates the production of “feel good” neurotransmitters like serotonin, which go back to the brain, increasing relaxation and beginning a cascade that feeds forward into itself.

The old saying goes, “happy wife, happy life,” but “happy gut makes a happy brain” might be more accurate.

Although the effects of practicing various qigong for health techniques are at least initially, global, masters of breathing exercises like Wim Hof have shown that conscious and direct, targeted increases in autonomic nervous functions like immune responses to pathogens like e. Coli can be achieved.[3]

Slow your breathing, heart rate drops, and the gut starts doing all kinds of things beneficial to our health. We can do all this consciously because the forward, “thinking” brain is wired into the brain stem through the limbic system (the emotional center of the brain), which is in turn wired to the vagus nerve.

Part two will continue with how stimulating the vagus nerve through breathing exercises like qigong and pranayama helps to regulate the immune system and improve blood pressure and gut health.

Learn More About Qigong

• What Is Qigong
• Marrow Washing Qigong

References

[1]Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain-Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders
Sigrid Breit, Aleksandra Kupferberg, Gerhard Rogler and Gregor Hasler

[2] Sudarshan kriya yoga: Breathing for health
Sameer A Zope, Rakesh A Zope[3] Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans
Matthijs Kox, et. al