Vision and Breathing May Be the Secrets to Surviving 2020

[SunSeeker]

14. Interesting article. I like how it describes your eyes as really just extensions of your brain.

And like your diaphragm, you can control both to change your mood:

Is there a visual mode associated with calmness that can change our stress levels?

Yes: panoramic vision, or optic flow. When [you] look at a horizon or at a broad vista, you don’t look at one thing for very long. If you keep your head still, you can dilate your gaze so you can see far into the periphery—above, below and to the sides of you. That mode of vision releases a mechanism in the brain stem involved in vigilance and arousal.

One can actually turn off the stress response by changing the way that we are viewing our environment, regardless of what’s in that environment.
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You are also researching breathing as a way to regulate autonomic arousal.

Yes. Vision and breathing are, without question, the fastest and most obvious ways to control autonomic arousal. The way we breathe impacts our states of stress very strongly.

Data show that during sleep and claustrophobic states, people and animals generate what are called “physiological sighs,” double inhales followed by exhales. Children also do this when they are sobbing. A physiological sigh, two or three times, is the fastest way that we are aware of to bring the level of autonomic arousal back down to baseline.