Recently, I was in the hospital getting prepped for a heart procedure. After a stroke in September, they found a hole in my heart that had probably caused it and needed repair. With IVs, needles and cuffs being put on me in preparation, the nurse turned to me and said, “Your wife wasn’t kidding. You don’t get worked up about anything hardly,” because my blood pressure and heart rate were not at all elevated. My wife knows I practice breathing and meditation in these moments of natural stress to control those things and she said, “He cheats.”

It’s not actually cheating, but it is a sort of magic that we can exert this kind of control over our brain and body simply by breathing.

Our brain is fundamentally concerned with protecting us and keeping us alive in the world, which is a good thing. But it also creates a lot of false information based on a lack of understanding. There is a small almond-shaped structure called the amygdala in our brain that determines whether sensory signals indicat…