to anyone feeling anxious right now 🐝 breathe with me
Does this happen to you? I’m halfway through writing a paragraph, my heart rate is starting to climb because my words are crawling away from me. The sound of the refrigerator humming or the washing machine whirring in the background slowly mount til I realize there’s a sustained tension in my body. The transition from fluid thought to overstimulation is subtle and then omnipresent.
🐝 Enter the bumble bee
Bhramari Pranayama (aka Bumble-Bee Breathing) is a tool for physiological regulation. It’s simple. No really.
Inhale through your nostrils.
Exhale mimicking a bumble bee’s hum
The vibration is the catalyst. It startles the tension out of my jaw. It feels like a gentle internal massage for my skull. By the third exhale, any frantic feeling has dissipated, or at least quieted.
I love this practice because it’s sensory-friendly. You aren’t trying to “clear your mind” which frankly can sometimes feel like an insurmountable task. Instead, we’re giving our minds a physical sensation to focus on. The body’s frequency returns without forcing anything. Anxious feelings abate. Focus reemerges on its own.
That is why this technique is used by the main character of the Witches Wager, Gordon Bennett, the amateur magician who struggles with anxiety in Book 1 of the Underestimated Club series. (Subscribe for chapter by chapter installments.)
The Science
The science of why this works comes with in a bit of laboratory history that I find particularly satisfying. In the late 1980s, Dr. Louis Ignarro was deep in the weeds of cardiovascular research, trying to identify an elusive “relaxing factor” that tells blood vessels to dilate.
The breakthrough happened because of a visitor with a cigarette.
As the story goes, a colleague walked into Ignarro’s lab while smoking. In a stroke of accidental genius, the research team noticed that the tissue samples they were studying (which were supposed to be under stress) suddenly and inexplicably relaxed. They realized the nitric oxide in the cigarette smoke was the “missing link” signaling the vessels to open up.
Ignarro eventually won the Nobel Prize for proving that our bodies produce this “miracle molecule” naturally.
Our sinuses are massive reservoirs for nitric oxide, but when we’re stressed and shallow-breathing, that gas sits stagnant. By humming, we create an oscillating airflow that acts like a mechanical pump, increasing the release of nitric oxide by up to 15 times. When we inhale that “flush” of nitric oxide back into the lungs, it acts as a potent vasodilator, widening blood vessels and sending a rush of oxygen to a tired, overstimulated brain.
Simultaneously, that hum vibrates the vagus nerve (the “high-speed cable” of our parasympathetic system) manually toggling the switch from “Fight or Flight” back to “Rest and Digest.” During bumble-bee breathing, my heart rate slows, or so my watch says.
When I finally open my eyes, the room hasn’t changed, but my relationship to it has. The sensory “itch” of a flickering light does not need to be scratched. Modulate the breath and the static clears on its own volition. The refrigerator is still humming, but it no longer feels oppressive. (Or my brief pause has made easy the common sense move of actually putting noise-cancelling headphones on.) I don't have to hunt for the next word; it's often right there there, waiting for me. A Nobel-winning molecular flush is just one 🐝 vibration away.
