Welcome to another edition of B-Well, a 30-minute webinar series, highlighting tips, resources, and coping skills from leading wellbeing experts to support you and your families. Prior episodes featured Thrive Global founder Arianna Huffington, renowned Buddhist meditation practitioner and author Jack Kornfield, award-winning comedian Trevor Noah, and pioneering psychiatrist Kim Norman.

Today we talk with Deepak Chopra, founder of The Chopra Foundation and Chopra Global. He’s the author of 90 books, including the recent New York Times bestseller, “Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential,” and professor of family medicine and public health at the University of California, San Diego.

In this video below, Chopra discusses how the fight-or-flight response brought on by chronic stress can trigger the release of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which lead to inflammation in the body. Conversely, the body’s parasympathetic nervous system works to “increase resilience and flexibility, decrease inflammation, and enhance immune capacity and homeostasis and self-regulation,” Chopra says. 

Chopra says we can achieve better balance and calm through breathing techniques, called pranayama, like meditation, as well as yoga, regular exercise, eating a healthy diet, having access to nature, and even getting a good night’s sleep. 

“This is an opportunity to rethink everything to understand the deeper significance of this pandemic,” Chopra adds. “When the pandemic is over, we’ll hopefully collectively reinvent our bodies and resurrect our souls and help each other in the creation of a better world.”

Want to put these ideas into practice? Join Chopra at the end of the video as he leads us through a short guided meditation to help focus our breathing.