04/14/2022
Alternative Nose š Breathing
Ā Suzanne M. Bertisch of Harvard Medical School and her colleagues reported, based on survey data, that more than 20 percent of American insomniacs do these breathing exercises to sleep better. They may be on to something.
In 2015 Cheryl Yang and her team at National Yang-Ming University in Taiwan showed that 20 minutes of slow breathing exercises (six respiration cycles per minute) before going to bed significantly improves sleep. Insomniac participants went to sleep faster, woke up less frequently in the night and went back to sleep faster when they did wake up.
The participants, all medical students, spent 15 minutes doing alternate nostril breathingāthat is, slowly inhaling through one nostril and exhaling through the other by applying finger pressure to the side of the nose not being used.
On average, it took them only 10 minutes to fall asleep, almost three times faster than normal.