Andrew Huberman· PhD
If you're doing inhales that are longer and more vigorous than exhales, it tends to be activating and alert you. If you're doing exhales that are longer and more vigorous than the inhales, it tends to put you to sleep.
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
If you're doing inhales that are longer and more vigorous than exhales, it tends to be activating and alert you. If you're doing exhales that are longer and more vigorous than the inhales, it tends to put you to sleep.
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the point here is that through purely mechanical means changing the way that you breathe, emphasizing inhales or exhales, or keeping them the same will change the way that your brain works, how alert you are and how well you function in anything.
if you'd like to be right where you're at at the end of your meditation as where you started, at least in terms of levels of alertness and calmness, well, then you would just keep your inhales and your exhales relatively balanced in terms of duration.
So an example of inhale-biased breathwork would be [inhales and exhales] [inhales and exhales], so there's an active emphasis on the inhale, and it's a little bit longer than the exhale which is passive.