Transcript:

In a fight-or-flight response, when there is urgent danger, the body has developed a mechanism by which the breathing shifts to shallow breathing. Why? Because a lot of oxygen is needed and there's not enough time to fill the entire lung, so only the top lobes of the lung are used in a fight-or-flight response mode. And this has come over evolution many thousands of years.

What has happened, though, in modern society is that ever since the chair was invented, the lifestyle has become more sedentary. People are sitting for a long time, and as a consequence, the regular pattern of breathing has shifted to shallow breathing. And now, the feedback mechanism is going the other way. Because of the shallow breathing, a fight-or-flight response is automatically triggered in the nervous system. It's called the sympathetic nervous system. And the body is in high-stress mode almost all the time.

The way to fix it is to actively change the breathing from shallow breathing to diaphragmatic breathing. And this is the practice of pranayama, which is why learning pranayama is very important.