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Today's HOW to LIVE is a guest post by Eddie Stern.

Eddie is a yoga teacher from NYC.

He runs a Hindu Temple in Soho, NYC, where he also teaches Yoga, writes, and engages in scientific research on Yoga. He has a Master’s in Science for Yoga Research from the Vivekananda Yoga University.

He lectures at medical, science, and Yoga conferences on the intersection between the spiritual disciplines of Yoga and their evidence-based physiological efficacies. He has written protocols for scientific research on Yoga over the past decade.

He's the author of One Simple Thing: A New Look at the Science of Yoga and How It Can Transform Your Life.

While it is true that he met David Bowie backstage at a Madonna concert, he met me first when I became his little sister, on the day I was born.

@eddiestern on Instagram and @eddiestern on Twitter

You can learn more about Eddie, including his class schedule, on his website.

I hope you enjoy my brother's piece on humming!!

On a very fundamental level, our lives are made up of patterns. Some of them are ingrained in our nervous systems, such as the wake-and-sleep cycles, our digestive cycles, and our physiological patterns, e.g., how often we breathe, the speed of our heart rate, and the cycles of work and rest that our internal organs follow.

We also have behavioral patterns: how we respond to stress or praise, and perceive situations occurring in the world and respond or act accordingly.

Our patterns, including our physiological patterns, can be altered. They can be thrown off from a baseline of what we might identify as balance, and they can also be brought back into balance with a little bit of work. If we are tremendously thrown off, it can take work, but it can be done, especially with consistency, support, and resolve.

As you'll see soon, humming is one way to restore ourselves to balance.

Over the past few decades, I’ve been fascinated by the different patterns that make up our respiratory and physiological systems, particularly our breath, the only pattern over which we have conscious control.

Changing our breathing patterns can impact our body functions, emotions, and cognitive abilities.

Take, for example, the sigh: We do that automatically throughout the day so the body can reinflate the tiny air sacs of the lungs that periodically collapse (it’s normal, don’t worry), but we also do it when we are feeling down, or when we need to release some stress.

Therefore, the breath is both an expression of our inner state and something we can use to change our inner state. In the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, by Svātmārāma, and other texts on yoga, the functions of the mind and those which drive the breath are considered the same. Breath and mind, mind and breath, are one and the same.

When you control or modify one, you can control the other. If you lose control of one, you lose control over the other.

We all know this to be true because when we have someone in front of us who is visibly upset, or freaking out—the first thing we tell them to do is breathe, by which we mean, slow down your breath, which has the effect of calming your body.

We learned this from the ancient Yogis, and while this might have seemed obvious to some, what was revelatory was the different practices they shared that heightened the inherent power of breath to lead to deep states of calm, clarity, and expanded awareness.

There is a fabulously complex substance created by our body, primarily in the paranasal sinuses, as well as the empty cavities of the head, just behind your nose, in the cheekbones, and forehead, which helps prepare the body to deal with hardship, called nitric oxide (NO).

It is a mild bronchodilator, which expands the breathing tubes (which can spasm in times of stress). This immunomodulator increases or decreases inflammation levels in the body to fight off disease and is an antifungal, antiviral, and antibacterial.

Over the past few decades, the pathogen-fighting properties of nitric oxide have been discovered, as well as its healing capacities.

The nitric oxide created in the nasal cavities is one of our frontlines of defense for incoming pathogens, and we need antivirals, antifungals, and antibacterials present to filter out and kill off harmful invaders like COVID-19 before they can either settle deep into the lung tissue or directly attack the brain through the olfactory nerves.

If periodically increasing nitric oxide is desirable, nature has provided a clear pathway: humming, which has been shown to generate nitric oxide in the nasal cavities by increasing the speed of the airflow in the paranasal sinuses.

Humming is a natural phenomenon that occurs spontaneously in human beings.

We hum when we are thinking, happy, taste something delicious, or agree or disagree as a non-language-based mode of communication. We hum wordless melodies or along with our favorite songs.

Children hum when they are happy and playing. Humming also keeps us company when we are alone. It is also a non-verbal signifier: we can convey a positive or negative, a non-committal, agreeable or non-agreeable feeling through a hum. We can say something without using words by humming, and the person we speak to will get the idea.

Nature is not capricious, so if humans bear an innate capacity for doing something in a particular way, it must exist for a purpose. And not only does humming serve to help us express ourselves; it also has some fantastic health benefits.

I practice humming as a breathing practice almost every day.

It is an ancient Yogic breathing practice, called Bhramari.

Here’s how you can try it:

Is your sound high-pitched or low-pitched? If it’s low-pitched, make it a little higher. If you were very high-pitched, lower the tone slightly so you aren’t straining your hum.

Next, we’ll make it a little more subtle and meditative.

If you feel slightly calmer or centered after just a few humming breaths, then that’s awesome; you’re doing it right. It works due to a complex interplay of interactions; the sound's vibration is sent through your autonomic nervous system.

The autonomic nervous system has two primary branches: the sympathetic and parasympathetic.

They control and oversee all the operations that keep us living, so we don’t have to think about them—breathing is one of the key. The vagal nerve complex, called the vagus nerve, makes up 80% of the parasympathetic nervous system.

This nerve complex is one of the most far-reaching of the nerves that extend from our brains, sending information down to our bodies, and, importantly, receiving signals from our internal organs about the state of our body. Extended exhalations, such as those produced by humming, strengthen the vagal brake, which slows the heartbeat and creates a feeling of calm and internal coherence.

The ability to tune into the signals our body is sending is one of the key purposes of a spiritual, contemplative, or meditative discipline. Still, it’s also a basic function of being human. Many of us have become cut off from what we are feeling in our bodies, and could help get back in touch with those feelings—slowing down is a very important part of that process.

The humming practice is a very effective means of slowing ourselves down, including our minds, our breath, our nervous system, and our bodies.

You can try this practice several times throughout the day.

If you do a few rounds after you wake up in the morning, it can help set you up before you start your day; a few rounds at night, and it can help wind you down before you go to sleep.

There are no contraindications for it.

Just stop if you feel that you are getting tired or strained. Usually, five to ten rounds are enough, but you can do up to 27.

This practice drives dogs nuts for some reason, but cats don’t seem to mind it.

Go figure.

Until next week, I will remain…