Why Are We Not Talking About Breathing?

There’s a conversation we’re not having about a free and easy health-improvement strategy that has the potential to make a big difference in your life.

That conversation is about your breathing.

I know, I know. ‘I breathe every day, all day.’

Sure, but how is the quality of your breathing? Where are you breathing? How are you breathing?

The details of how and where (in your body) you breathe can have a pretty significant impact on how your body responds to stress, how well you sleep, and the effectiveness of your immune system. In short, it can impact just about every aspect of your overall health and wellness.

In this moment that we’re all living through, where a respiratory disease continues to spread around the globe, improving your breathing may even play a role in keeping you healthy.

Why Breathing?

In the most basic way, deep diaphragmatic nasal breathing can de-stress your body (and mind).

To explain, we’re going to have to get into some nerdy science.

Ready? Let’s dive in:

First, some basics: Let’s start with your Nervous System. That’s your brain, spinal cord and all of the nerves that branch in and out from there.

One part of your nervous system is called your Autonomic Nervous System. This is the part of your nervous system that governs all of the things that go on in your body without your conscious control.

There are two ‘sides’ to your autonomic nervous system: the Sympathetic and the Parasympathetic Nervous System. (Literally, systems of nerves).

Your sympathetic nervous system is responsible for all things fight or flight. Basically, any stressor in your life—be it a lion that you have to run away from or fight or a performance review from your boss or thinking about systemic injustices—it’s all the same as far as your sympathetic nervous system is concerned. Stressors trigger the body’s stress response: hormones like adrenaline and cortisol enter your bloodstream, your heart rate goes up, muscle tension goes up, your blood pressure rises. You get the idea.

On the other side of the coin, we have the parasympathetic nervous system, which is often summarized as the rest and digest system. The parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for creating the opposite of the stress response: your body secretes calming hormones, your heart rate goes down, muscles relax, your blood pressure goes down. It’s good stuff.

The basics of breathing are inhale (breathe in) and exhale (breathe out). When we’re stressed, we tend to breathe in more air than we breathe out. Actually, since modern life tends to be stressful, most of us tend to inhale more than we exhale.

Try taking a big breath IN and pausing for a second before you breathe out again. Notice all the muscles that got tense? Your neck muscles, your shoulders, your back. All of these tend to end up tense.

Many of us tend to breathe using those neck, back and upper chest muscles all the time. And many of us don’t breathe through our noses very often.

On the other hand, try taking a normal breath in through your nose and then purse your lips slightly and do longer, slower, fuller breath OUT than you might normally do. Notice how your shoulders begin to fall away from your ears? Notice how some of the tension begins to fade from your neck?

Longer breaths out have a direct impact on your parasympathetic nervous system—the ‘rest and digest’ side of your autonomic nervous system. This triggers a reduction in stress hormones and lessens the effects of your body’s stress response.

Better Stress Response, Better Immune Health

Unless your day-to-day life is one unending explosion of bliss and joy, chances are your life features some stress.

(And hey, if your life is full of constant joy and bliss, that’s awesome! High five!)

We tend to carry this stress around with us, all day long, without an outlet.

Here’s the thing: stress is always going to be a part of life. What matters is how your body buffers—or responds to—the stress. Exercise is great for this…so keep doing that. (If you’re not currently exercising but would like to, let me know). But our modern lives tend to be filled with so many stressors that every little bit of ‘stress reduction’ helps.

To clarify for a moment, I say ‘stress reduction’ because none of the things we discuss here will actually reduce stress. This is where deliberately changing your breathing mechanics comes into play. Deliberately lengthening the duration of your ‘out’ breath will trigger a parasympathetic response in your body, reducing the effects of stress on your body.

Reducing the effects of stress on your body will not only help you to feel more at ease and able to cope with life, it will also calm your mind and help you to sleep better.

Improving how you breathe also helps your immune system to remain strong (whereas too much stress lowers immunity). This amounts to a free, easy-to-do piece of preventative care that you can do anytime, anywhere—at a time in our history when staying healthy is more important than ever.

Prevent Or Reduce Inflammation

But wait, there’s more!

As you may or may not know, there is a powerful connection between inflammation in the body and a wide variety of illnesses and disease states (e.g., cardiovascular disease and diabetes). Most notably right now is the relationship between inflammation and COVID-19: elevated levels of inflammation in your body are thought to be linked to more severe infections.

There is a significant body of research that has repeatedly demonstrated that deep, diaphragmatic breathing—which features that longer, slower, fuller exhalation we’ve been talking about—engages your parasympathetic nervous system. When your parasympathetic nervous system is active, it triggers a reduction in inflammatory markers in your system. Relaxation leads to decreased inflammation.

Decreased inflammation means better immune function. Better immune function means reduced risk.

Now, please don’t misunderstand: I’m not saying that improving how you breathe is a cure-all or like a magic pill. It’s one piece of the larger picture of health and wellness. It just happens to be a rather powerful—and underappreciated—piece of that picture.

And to be even more clear: all of those “pieces of the puzzle” help. In the context of the pandemic, wearing a mask helps. Social distancing helps. Limiting the amount of time you spend in close proximity to people outside of your bubble helps. And eating nutritious food helps. Exercising helps. Breathing well helps.

How To Change Your Breathing

I have good news: it’s really quite straightforward.

Try this:

• Sit comfortably with your spine upright. You can have something against your back or not, whichever option suits you best.
• Place both hands on your bottom ribs, in the space between your navel and your sternum.
• Breathe in easily through your nose.
• When you breathe out, do the longest, slowest exhalation possible through your nose.
• Notice that as you breathe out, your ribs begin to shift downward.
• When you breathe in again, try not to let your ribs rise back up in front of you. Think of breathing into your sides and back. This takes some practice.

Start with trying this for one minute and gradually expand the time from there. Ultimately, the goal is to breathe through your nose most of the time. There is some evidence to suggest that nasal breathing may help to prevent viral infections, like COVID-19.

Again, it’s not everything and it’s certainly not proof against infection forever, but it will help you. In many ways.