Author Andy Murphy . Published in ILLUMINATION

Controlling the breath and relaxing the eyes are two of the best life hacks & the good news is it only takes two minutes.

If you’ve ever seen an animal experience fear, you may have noticed how they shake and shake and shake until all of their tension has been released. They simply move on with their lives after that without carrying it any further. Not every place allows us humans to shake like a wild animal (even though I wish they did). So, we often store and bottle it up out of politeness.

There is another way though and it’s what I’d like to share with you now. It’s one of the ways wild animals can be hunted one minute and graze upon the grass as if nothing happened the next.

Create “soft” eyes

Our eyes, like the breath, often reflect our emotional state. Sharp, dilated, focused eyes, for example, reveal a heightened sense of alertness. Soft, open eyes, on the other hand, reflect a sense of ease and relaxation. So, by creating “soft eyes” the nervous system naturally relaxes as a result because the vagus nerve is stimulated.

This practice is great for relieving stress, reducing anxiety, and relaxing the body. It’s a quick and effective way to tap into the parasympathetic nervous system and it can be practiced anywhere all of the time.

Putting it into practice:

• Sit comfortably and allow your body to relax
• Look straight ahead and land your gaze on an object in the distance
• Begin to connect to your peripheral vision while continuing to look straight ahead
• Now, expand your awareness to the spaces up and down without moving your eyes. Then connect your vision to spaces at the side as well.
• Allow your focus to be on ‘all things’ all at once as your eyes begin to ‘soften’
• Stay connected to your breath
• Remain here for as long as it feels good

Turning to Nature

When it came to understanding health, our ancestors often turned to nature to find out what they could learn. So, when it came to the breath, their approach was no different. They did this by observing animals in their environment and what they found was that some animals take fewer breaths per minute than others and those that do, live longer lives.

Elephants who breathe 4–5 breaths a minute, for example, live up to 70 years old. Sperm whales breathe 3–5 breaths and live up to 70+ years. Tortoises live anywhere from 80–300 years and breathe 4–8 breaths per minute. And then there is the naked mole rat who can go 18 minutes without oxygen and lives up to 32 years old. This, remarkably, is 6x longer than their rodent relatives.

One of the most interesting observations they found in these animals, however, was not their long lives that were impressive but rather the qualityof their lives. These slow-breathing, oxygen-efficient, and carbon dioxide-tolerant animals have a higher resistance to disease, illness, and cancer, and the correlation between taking fewer breaths and breathing them slowly seems to be a big factor in this.

The Chinese even came up with a fabulous little proverb to explain the phenomenon: “Breathe like a tortoise, live like a King.” Paramhansa Yogananda — author of Autobiography of a Yogi — described it like this: “Many illustrations could be given of the mathematical relationship between man’s respiratory rate and the variations in his states of consciousness. A person whose attention is wholly engrossed, as in following some closely knit intellectual argument, or in attempting some delicate or difficult physical feat, automatically breathes very slowly. Fixity of attention depends on slow breathing; quick or uneven breaths are an inevitable accompaniment of harmful emotional states: fear, lust, anger. The restless monkey breathes at the rate of 32 times a minute, in contrast to man’s average of 18 times. The elephant, tortoise, snake and other animals noted for their longevity have a respiratory rate which is less than man’s.”

If humans breathed fewer breaths per minute, could we also experience such health, vitality, and resilience that our friendly neighbours do? From the large array of studies that have been conducted over the years, the results seem to suggest so.

Closing thoughts

Controlling the breath and relaxing the eyes are two of the best life hacks I know of. And as they come with us everywhere we go they can always be relied upon, trusted, and utilised. They’re the most inclusive and non-dogmatic tools we have at our disposal.

So, you don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars or take an online course to learn the secrets of life, all you have to do is tap into nature’s impeccable design and lean into its innate wisdom to get immediate results.