Breathing Hacks to Manage Daily Energy

Kasper van der Meulen — Breathwork specialist, Science Teacher & Musician

Kasper van der Meulen is a Bestselling Author, Biohacker and Science Teacher. He went from being overweight, burnt out and unhappy, to developing extraordinary focus, fitness and personal freedom. He put himself through numerous experiments and challenges, conquered the cold, ran ultramarathons on his bare feet, tested countless diets, read a ton of scientific literature and explored as many esoteric practices he could find. With over ten thousand hours of experience in as a teacher, trainer and speaker, he always finds the most fun and easy ways to convey powerful messages into practical applications for his audience. Kasper now travels the world on a mission to teach others to be the healthiest, happiest and strongest version of themselves through transformative experiences, scientific understanding and vivid storytelling. He specializes in creating instant wins for people at the fringes of human performance, ranging from elite athletes to armed forces special operatives to high powered CEO’s.

A state of mind and body produces a state of breath, but a state of breath also produces a state of mind and body. Our ability to consciously change our breathing gives us the ability to consciously change our state.

Summary

- Breathing serves as an immediate tool to influence the autonomic nervous system, enabling conscious control over mental and physical states in real time. - Fast chest and mouth breathing activate the sympathetic nervous system for energy, while slow nose and diaphragm breathing with long exhales trigger parasympathetic recovery and calm. - Techniques like "bouncing breath" can provide a natural energy boost, while "box breathing" during work transitions helps maintain mental clarity and focus. - Calming the heart rate through focused breathing before meals improves digestion and prevents energy dips by shifting the body into a "rest-and-digest" state. - The 4-7-8 technique—inhaling for four, holding for seven, and exhaling for eight seconds—is a powerful tool for rapidly de-escalating stress and inducing restful sleep.

Article

Breathing As A Lever Of Modern Life

At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Kasper Van Der Meulen Argued That The Fastest Way To Change How We Feel Was Hidden In The One Function We Too Often Ignore

In a culture addicted to optimization, people often search for salvation in the exotic: nootropics, fasting stacks, cold plunges, biometric dashboards, expensive supplements with futuristic names. Yet at Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, held in Helsinki, Finland, on 1 November 2019, Kasper van der Meulen offered a more intimate technology. It was free, portable, ancient and immediate. It was breath.

Speaking in his presentation, *Breathing Hacks to Manage Daily Energy*, van der Meulen, a bestselling author, biohacker and former science teacher, made a strikingly simple case: breathing was not merely background biology but a real-time switchboard for the nervous system. Change the breath, he suggested, and the body changed with it. Change the body, and the mind often followed.

“Breathing is the most effective in-the-moment intervention to manage your state because it is always happening in the now,” he said. “It is the one thing you always have to do, from the inhale you start life with to the exhale you end it on.”

A Biohacker’s Case For The Obvious

Van der Meulen’s authority did not arrive in the polished language of abstract wellness. It came with the rough edges of autobiography. He described a former life marked by anxiety, migraines, excess weight and burnout, and a professional life as a biology teacher who became fascinated by the gap between what science knew about human performance and what most people actually practiced.

He did not frame breathing as mysticism, nor even as a passion project. He framed it as utility. It worked.

That pragmatism gave the session its charge. Van der Meulen did not ask his audience to accept doctrine. He asked them to test sensation against theory, to notice how rapidly the body responded to different patterns of inhalation and exhalation. In a room full of self-experimenters, that argument landed with unusual force. Breath, unlike most interventions in the wellness economy, gave feedback instantly.

“If you think breathing isn't the most important thing you do, try to hold your breath while you answer emails,” he said. “You will get your priorities in check very quickly.”

The Nervous System In Plain Sight

What van der Meulen mapped for the audience was not just a breathing practice but a physiology lesson. The autonomic nervous system, he explained, moved between two broad poles: the sympathetic state associated with action, alertness and fight or flight, and the parasympathetic state associated with calm, recovery and digestion.

The body, in his telling, was not confused about what these states required. Fast chest breathing through the mouth tended to accompany activation. Slow nasal breathing, led by the diaphragm and often extended on the exhale, tended to support recovery. The breath was both messenger and mechanism.

He demonstrated this not with slides but through experience. Audience members were asked first to speed up their breathing through the mouth and chest. The results were familiar and unnerving: shoulders rose, heart rates climbed, discomfort surfaced, energy surged. Then came the reversal: nasal breathing, softer belly movement, longer exhalations. Yawns broke out across the room. Bodies visibly softened.

The lesson was elegantly circular. A state of mind and body produced a state of breath. But the reverse was also true. A state of breath could produce a state of mind and body.

That insight remains one of the most powerful and underused ideas in self-regulation. Many people accept that panic changes breathing. Fewer act on the corollary that breathing can interrupt panic.

From Performance To Digestion, The Body Kept Score

The true ambition of the talk was not simply stress relief. It was state management across the whole day.

Van der Meulen described breathing as a set of “knobs and levers” for navigating work, meals, focus, energy and sleep. The point was not to remain calm at all times. It was to match the body’s state to the task at hand. Alertness was useful in the morning, before focused work, before performance. Calm was useful before food, before recovery, before bed. Problems began when the body was trapped in one gear.

This was his critique of modern life. Too many people woke into stress, worked through stress, ate in stress and tried, unsuccessfully, to sleep in stress. The result was not high performance but chronic misalignment. The body that should have turned toward digestion at lunch stayed braced for threat. The mind that should have powered down at night stayed lit by unfinished loops.

In one of the session’s most practical observations, he warned that eating in a sympathetic state could sabotage both digestion and energy. If the body was still acting as though it needed to run, fight or think under pressure, it was poorly prepared to process a meal. A brief breathing intervention before eating, he suggested, could soften the heart rate, activate rest-and-digest functions and reduce the notorious post-lunch crash.

The Morning Check-In

Among the most useful ideas van der Meulen shared was a simple morning diagnostic: exhale, pause, and calmly notice how many seconds passed before the urge to breathe returned. This measure of carbon dioxide tolerance, drawn from Buteyko-style practice and familiar in breathwork circles, was presented as a clue to readiness.

A short and strained pause, he said, could indicate a system already tilted toward stress. It might reflect lower resilience, poorer tolerance for CO2, or a day when pushing for maximal output would be unwise. Alongside that came a second check: whether an inhale expanded the belly or raised the shoulders. The former pointed toward diaphragmatic breathing and relative calm. The latter suggested a more activated, stress-linked pattern.

These were not glamorous metrics. They were not algorithmic scores generated by a device. But they were direct, embodied and available at waking, before caffeine, before screens, before the day made its claims.

The Tactical Breath

Van der Meulen’s presentation moved briskly from theory to application. He highlighted several practical techniques, each suited to a different moment in the daily cycle.

For activation, he described the “bouncing breath”, a rhythmic practice using gentle bouncing on the toes with natural exhalations. The aim was to charge the system before reaching instinctively for stimulants.

For transitions during work, he recommended what he called the “one breath break”: an inhale through the nose, a brief hold to create pressure, followed by a relaxing exhale and a short pause before the next breath. It was a miniature reset, subtle enough to fit between emails and meetings.

For maintaining calm clarity, he pointed to box breathing, long used in performance contexts where composure mattered as much as focus.

And for sleep, he returned to one of the most recognizable protocols in contemporary breathwork: the 4-7-8 technique popularized by Dr Andrew Weil. Inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, exhale for eight. The architecture of the pattern itself did part of the work. It slowed the breath, extended the release and invited the nervous system to descend.

“Give yourself five to ten minutes of self-care to observe your breathing like the amazing tool it is,” van der Meulen said. “You will learn a ton about your physiology and how your mental state responds to simply slowing down or speeding up.”

The Science, The Experience, The Truth

What made the session compelling was that van der Meulen refused to separate science from sensation. He spoke as a teacher but also as an experimenter, someone shaped by Wim Hof’s influence, endurance tests, cold exposure and years of translating theory into embodied practice. Yet his central message was almost anti-spectacular.

Breathing did not need to be extreme to be effective. It needed to be intentional.

“Every single time you tune in with your breath, you can find the truth, the science, and the experience of how breathing influences your state in every moment,” he said.

That line captured the philosophy underneath the hacks. Biohacking, in his view, was not about collecting ever more tools. It was about using the right tool at the right time, with the minimum effective dose for the greatest gain in life quality. Breath was perhaps the purest expression of that principle because it was always present, always adjustable, and always reporting back.

A Child’s Breath, A Lost Baseline

Near the end of the talk, van der Meulen invoked an image more powerful than any chart: the effortless breathing of a small child. Gentle nasal breathing, soft abdomen, unforced rhythm. The suggestion was not sentimental. It was diagnostic. Somewhere along the road to adulthood, many people had lost that baseline.

Stress, poor habits, overwork and constant stimulation had turned breathing into a mirror of modern tension. The invitation of the session was to become playful enough, and attentive enough, to reclaim it.

“Biohacking is about finding the right tools for the right job, the minimum effective dose for a maximum amount of life quality, and being playful as you rediscover how your nervous system responds to your breath,” he said.

The Most Immediate Technology

There was something almost subversive in the modesty of van der Meulen’s message at Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki. In a field often seduced by hardware and novelty, he returned the audience to a function so basic it was easy to dismiss. Yet that may have been precisely why it mattered.

Breath sat at the seam between conscious and unconscious life. It happened automatically, yet could be guided deliberately. It was biological, emotional and behavioral all at once. And unlike so many promises in the performance world, it did not postpone its results.

A faster breath could sharpen urgency. A longer exhale could slow the heart. A calmer pre-meal rhythm could aid digestion. A structured cadence before bed could invite sleep. The intervention was small. The implications were not.

What van der Meulen offered was less a technique than a reframing: energy was not only something to consume, it was something to regulate. And the master switch, he argued persuasively, had been with us all along.

Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki