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Doctor shares 'five-finger breathing' technique to help adults and kids fall asleep fast

It's like making a turkey when you were in kindergarten.

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A man's hand and a woman sleeping.

One of the best ways to improve your health is to regularly get at least seven hours of quality sleep a night. But unfortunately for many Americans, that type of sleep can be hard to come by. A recent report found that 12% of Americans have chronic insomnia, and about one out of every three do not get the recommended sleep they need for optimal health.

It’s not surprising that people are having a hard time getting some shut-eye; there are a lot of things to keep people up at night these days. But there are methods endorsed by the medical community to help calm your mind and body, making it much easier to fall asleep. The Cleveland Clinic released a video on TikTok where pain specialist and behavioral medicine psychologist Judith Scheman, PhD, explains the technique to help people fall asleep.

@clevelandclinic

Five-finger breathing is a simple but powerful breathing technique that induces deep relaxation — and you can do just about anywhere! 🖐️ Unlike other types of breathwork, five-finger breathing is a multisensory experience where you concentrate on more than just your breath. You also focus on the movement and sensation of one hand touching another, slowly and with intentionality. This helps your brain enter a state of deep relaxation, which causes it to release endorphins.

How to do five-finger breathing for deep relaxation

Step 1: Position your hands

Close your eyes, hold one hand out, and spread your fingers. This is known as your base hand. Take the index finger on your other hand and place it at the bottom of your extended thumb.

Step 2: Breathe while you trace

Slowly move your finger up the thumb on your base hand while inhaling. When you reach the top of the thumb, begin to exhale on your way down. Repeat this process for every finger, making sure you keep your breath slow and steady.

Step 3: Reverse

Once you've reached your pinky, it’s time to go back the other way on the hand. Keep your breathing slow to release tension in your body with each exhale.

Why does five-finger breathing work?

The technique is effective because it allows the parasympathetic nervous system to release endorphins, which calm the brain. Endorphins comes from the combination of two words: morphine, the opiate pain reliever, and “endogenous,” which means “within the body.” Combined, it means a natural, internal pain reliever.

The technique is also helpful for children. It’s easy to teach because it’s similar to making a hand turkey like they did in kindergarten. But instead of tracing their hand with a pencil, they just use their finger.

Here is a fun explanation for kids with Rashmi from Yoga Guppy.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Recently, Upworthy featured another sleep hack, this time courtesy of popular neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. “In fact, if you wake up in the middle of the night and you're having trouble falling back asleep, try just doing some long, extended exhales. And get this, this sounds really weird, but it has a basis in physiology. Keep your eyes closed and just move your eyes from side to side behind your eyelids like this, back and forth,” Huberman told Bill Maher on an episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, as he moved his eyes from side to side as if he was surveying a vast landscape. “Do some long exhales. I can't promise, but I'm willing to wager like maybe one pinky, that within five minutes or so, you'll be back to sleep.”

Huberman says that the movement helps us calm down because our brains evolved to sense that if we are walking forward, then were aren’t facing any threats. When we walk forward, we tend to move our eyes from side to side, as if surveying the landscape in front of us. Therefore, it releases chemicals to keep the mind calm.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Whether you use the five-finger breathing hack, the Andrew Huberman eye technique, or this military exercise, there’s nothing wrong with having as many tools in your sleep shed as possible. Who knows, one night the finger trick may put you right back to sleep, and the eye roll method may work on another. All that matters in the morning is that you got some decent shut-eye.

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How a simple shift in your morning routine can improve your sleep and energize you all day

The good news is this 'biohack' requires almost no willpower.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Going outside and facing the sun every morning can be life-changing.

Most of us have a desire to improve our health, sleep more soundly, have more energy and just generally feel better in our daily lives. And yet those things feel elusive to many of us, so we're always on the hunt for hacks that can help us—and if those hacks don't require a huge change in lifestyle or herculean feats of willpower, all the better.

Thankfully, there's one small change you can make to your morning routine that can make a big difference in how you feel, think and sleep, and it's refreshingly simple.

In a nutshell: Go outside and face the sun. More specifically, go outside as soon as possible after waking, but definitely within the hour, and look toward the sun for 2 to 10 minutes if it's a bright, sunny day and a little longer on a cloudy one.

Most of us know we get vitamin D from sun exposure on our skin, but that's really not what getting morning sunlight is about. It's about the sun's light energy hitting our eyes.

As Dr. Andrew Huberman, Stanford University neuroscience professor and opthamologist, explains, "This is not some 'woo' biological thing. This is grounded in the core of our physiology. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of quality peer-reviewed papers showing that light viewing early in the day is the most powerful stimulus for wakefulness throughout the day and it has a powerful positive impact on your ability to fall and stay asleep at night."

Huberman calls it a "power tool" for getting a great night's sleep and lists it as one of the six pillars people should invest in every day—morning sunlight, daily movement, quality nutrition, stress control, healthy relationships and deep sleep.

While the advice to look toward the sun flies in the face of all the times we've been warned not to look at the sun, in the early morning, the sun is less intense and you don't need to look directly at it to get the benefits of its light rays. The photons still enter your eyes through indirect light, triggering the cortisol spike that sets your circadian rhythm in order.

"Getting sunlight in your eyes first thing in the morning is absolutely vital to mental and physical health," Huberman says. "It is perhaps the most important thing that any and all of us can and should do in order to promote metabolic well-being, promote the positive functioning of your hormone system, get your mental health steering in the right direction."

He explains that artificial lights aren't the same and won't have the same impact. Conversely, artificial light can mess up your circadian rhythm if you look at them too late at night or when you should be sleeping.

"There's this asymmetry in our retinal, in our eye biology and our brain's biology, whereby early in the day, right around waking, you need a lot of light, a lot of photons, a lot of light energy," he says on his podcast. "And artificial lights generally won't accomplish what you need them to accomplish. But at night, even a little bit of artificial light can really mess up your so-called circadian, your 24-hour clocks, and all these mechanisms we're talking about."

The good news is that stepping out your front door and standing in the sun doesn't require a whole lot of willpower—at least not like exercise or resisting screens in the evening does. Simply go outside and stand there (though walking is even better). Give it a try and see if it makes a difference for you.

And you can also see Dr. Huberman go a lot more in depth about the benefits of sunlight and light therapies of all kinds here.


This article originally appeared on 1.13.24

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Andrew Huberman wows Jimmy Fallon with transformational stress hack on 'Tonight Show'

This is the “the fastest and best way to de-stress” in real time.

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon/Youtube

Huberman guiding Jimmy Fallon though a simple breathing exercises for stress relief.

There’s no such thing as stress-free living. Sure, we can mitigate it through various mindfulness practices and lifestyle choices—meditating, getting good sleep, not overdoing the caffeine, etc. But still, there will inevitably be moments throughout the day that cause some sort of anxiety. And more often than not, we won’t be able to say, “excuse me, I just need to pop out for 20 minutes to do some yoga. Brb.”

Luckily, even those moments can be manageable. All you gotta do is breathe. Yes, really.

Recently, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman made a guest appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” where he discussed a variety of topics frequently brought up on his popular podcast, including the benefits of being exposed to sunlight within the first hour of waking.

Huberman then guided Fallon and the audience through a simple breathing exercise that’s “the fastest and best way to de-stress” in real time.

First, everyone did a double inhale through their nose—a complete inhale that filled the lungs followed by one more inhale to “sneak in a bit more air.” Then they did a full exhale through their mouth, completely emptying out their lungs.

Watch:

As Huberman explained to Fallon, this type of breathing, called “physiological sighs,” was discovered by scientists in the 1930s. It’s something we do naturally throughout the day and during sleep, and it works by adjusting the levels of carbon dioxide to oxygen in our bloodstream, which affect the brain. Doing just 1, maybe 2, intentional physiological sighs “brings your level of stress down immediately.”

Huberman’s exercise (which he affirms is not a “hack”) was met by an exuberant applause from the audience, and lots of praise from online viewers.

Take a look at some of these comments:

“The silence of the audience’s focused attention is audible.”

“I love that he has no time for small talk and is determined to get across as much science as possible in the allotted time. Service to humanity.”

“Andrew Huberman is a national treasure! He teaches us so much about so many interesting topics and does it in a way that keeps us wanting more.”

“Huberman is the best thing that has happened on the internet in recent years.”

“I see Professor Huberman as the ultimate example. He does what he loves, tries to improve himself daily both as a professional and a person, shares his experience with people who have the same enthusiasm. More importantly, he shares this experience for FREE for the sake of sharing it.”

If we ever needed more proof that audiences are longing for more substance, this is it. If you’re not following Huberman but want more tips just like this, his Youtube channel is only a click away.

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The simple, yet powerful shift that can actually keep you motivated

Andrew Huberman breaks down what people can do to stick to their goals—and it's surprisingly easy.

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Maybe we're focusing on the wrong thing.

There are a bajillion and one approaches out there when it comes to goal-setting, usually in the form of clever acronyms to remind us all of just how easy achieving our dreams can be. (Did you know there are more than just SMART goals? There are also HARD goals, WOOP goals, and OKR goals, according to Indeed.)

Still, despite the countless productivity tips, consistent motivation is something many of us struggle with. And while there can be serious factors causing this, like external stress or underlying mental health issues, it’s generally just a common thing people deal with. It’s really hard to keep your “eye on the prize” day in and day out, isn’t it?

But what if we shifted our perspective on what exactly the “prize” is in this scenario? According to neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman, it could mean a lot.

If you somehow have never heard of Andrew Huberman, he does deep dives on a wide range of complex scientific topics on his popular Huberman Lab podcast, explaining them in ways that are both easy to understand and applicable to everyday life.

Huberman regularly discusses the benefits of working with your body’s dopamine, i.e., pleasure hormone, in order to be more productive. In the case of staying motivated, he encourages people to make a mindset shift where they access pleasure from hard work rather than achievement.

Huberman notes that when we focus only on the “win” and work only for the sake of reward, it actually makes the required hard labor that much harder and less desirable, and generally makes us less likely to pursue more hard work in the future.

The concept of intrinsic motivation vs. extrinsic motivation became quite mainstream thanks to a well-known study conducted in 1973 in which researchers at Stanford gathered young children ages 3 to 5 who liked to draw and started rewarding them for drawing. After a while, the researchers stopped giving out the rewards, which caused a drop in interest among the children.

Bottom line: We garner less pleasure from activities when we begin to associate that pleasure with rewards, rather than the activity itself. That even goes for activities we naturally enjoy.

From a dopamine perspective, Huberman explains that if the “peak” in dopamine levels you get comes from a reward, it’s going to lower your baseline dopamine levels, which then signals to your brain that pleasure = reward, not pleasure = challenging activity, which is not always sustainable.

Luckily, there’s a way to rewire this perspective by incorporating a growth mindset.
mindset, growth mindset, motivation

Anyone can cultivate a growth mindset.

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Having a growth mindset, a term coined by Carol Dweck, means viewing one’s mind as always being at the starting point, and focusing on deepening a love of learning through engaging in challenges, rather than trying to accomplish an end goal. Those who have this view have time and time again achieved great things, but only as a byproduct of willingly engaging in the effort for its own sake.

And the best part is anyone can cultivate this mindset.

“You can tell yourself the effort part is the good part. I know it’s painful. I know this doesn’t feel good. But I’m focused on this. I’m going to start to access the reward,” Huberman says.

Repeating this over and over again—especially during the most difficult parts—will eventually make that growth mindset sink in, and it will extend to all types of effort.

In other words, sometimes it is good to lie to ourselves.

Watch Huberman's full podcast episode on motivation and dopamine below. It’s full of other science-based gems.

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