The secret to a calm mind, a healthy body and even clearer, younger skin is literally right under your nose. It’s also inside your nose – in fact, it’s throughout your head, neck and torso and it powers your whole body. Even better, it’s absolutely free in unlimited amounts. Breathing, specifically conscious breathing, is the secret to unlocking so many parts of you. It’s the new wellness trend; but it isn’t a new discovery.
Breathwork is at the very core of health trends that have been growing in the West since the 1960s and have existed for much, much longer in the East – altering breathing patterns to improve health and state of mind are at the core of ancient practices such as yoga, tai chi and qigong.
So, what’s changed? Why are we now hearing the term ‘breathwork’ so much? How are local GPs only just taking these techniques seriously as an intervention to improve wellness?
I think two things have changed. Number one, people are no longer afraid of being eclectic in their tastes – finding what works for them from different traditions and combining the best parts to make something new. Modern music and cuisine are post-genre and encourage constant cultural fusion, why should health be any different? Breathing is common to everyone on earth and the physiology behind breathing practices transcends culture.
The second and perhaps more important factor is the overwhelming body of new evidence that science has given us over the last few decades. In 1975, Dr Herbert Benson released The Relaxation Response a scientific book written in plain English. The book not only explained the author’s groundbreaking research into how relaxation through meditation improves heart health, it also acted as a call to arms for other doctors and researchers to join in and study this largely overlooked field.
Benson was initially ridiculed by his peers in traditional medicine who couldn’t see a place for something as organic and subjective as the mind in a world of high-end surgical and pharmaceutical interventions. But slowly people began to see the benefits for themselves, and ever since there has been a rush to explore this aspect of our health from a more evidence-based perspective. The proof of the benefits of conscious breathing is now beyond doubt.
Science is not only proving the claims of the yogis to be true; it’s building on their practices with revelatory new ideas.
Your breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure, hormonal state and digestive system are all controlled automatically by your autonomic nervous system… they are all crucial to your survival, but you never have to think about them. The breath is the one element of this system you can consciously control, but by changing the way you breathe, you can alter the other elements of the pattern for unbelievable health benefits.
It’s important to point out that there is no ‘right’ way to breathe. But subtly changing how you breathe can have beneficial effects – particularly on helping your nervous system cope with and recover from stress.
Done right, breathing techniques can balance your nervous system, reduce your stress response, improve your sleep and digestion and increase your lifespan by boosting your body’s own inner knowledge.
The breath isn’t just an airway, it’s a pathway, an open door into the parts of ourselves that we think we can’t control.
8 steps to beneficial breathing
1. Posture
Breathing affects posture and posture affects breathing. The more open and alert your posture, the more space you have in your torso to breathe and welcome oxygen into your lungs. Posture also affects your mood in a big way. See if you can notice and follow the naturally expansive and uplifting movements of your next inhalation to open up your posture organically.
2. Depth
How deeply are you breathing? Higher volume means more oxygen feeding your body, which means more energy and greater expulsion of toxins like CO2. The more we engage our diaphragm when we breathe, the more the natural movement of the breath massages our internal organs. Diaphragmatic breathing also activates the vagus nerve which has a naturally calming effect.
3. Speed
When we’re stressed or angry, we take short, shallow breaths as though we are preparing for a ‘fight or flight’ situation, or we stop breathing entirely as though we’re bracing for an impact. The trouble is, in modern life we can rarely overcome the stresses we face with aggression or avoidance. Slowing down your breathing rate sends a signal to your brain that everything is OK and your body begins to reverse the fight or flight response.
4. Ratio
Elongating the exhalation in relation to the inhalation has a similar but more pronounced relaxing effect to slowing down your overall breathing rate. This is what happens when we sigh; the body has had enough and is trying to create a breathing ratio with a longer exhalation so it can calm itself down.
5. Rhythm
Potentially the most unexpected and powerful variable over time. Dr Patricia Gerbarg and Dr Richard Brown in the US have done amazing research into how just ten minutes a day of rhythmic breathing can radically improve the health of your vagus nerve and in doing so elongate your life expectancy. They also use their techniques to help treat children suffering from PTSD after major disasters.
6. Location
Where in your body are you breathing ‘into’? Are you breathing down into your belly? Or taking shallower breaths into your upper chest? Using the diaphragm to pull the air down into your belly protects your back muscles from exhaustion – particularly important for desk workers who are hunched over – reducing the amount of space their diaphragm has to move.
7. Consciousness
How conscious are you of your breathing? The breath is always there, and always dynamic, ever shifting but ever present. That’s why so many spiritual practices use it as a subject of meditation. Becoming conscious of your breathing brings you into the present, out of your mind and into your body. From the soft sounds to the sensation of your clothes moving softly across your skin, there is almost always a relaxing or gentle sensation linked to the breath that you can enjoy in and of itself. See if you can find one now and observe it changing for a few breaths.
8. Moving with the breath
Dynamic practices, whether yoga, qigong, tai chi, dancing, or even simply drawing your breath with a pencil – these techniques that follow the rhythm of the breath with movement create a physical representation of your breath in the world. Your meditation becomes physical as well as abstract and training your attention on the breath becomes much easier – it becomes an embodied experience anchored in the real world.
Have a go now if you like: take a pencil and some paper and draw up in time with your inhalation and down in time with your exhalation as though the pencil is being controlled by the movement of your diaphragm. Move across the page for two breaths so that you end up with a rough ’M’ shape… Do you feel any different?
Tom Granger is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed Draw Breath: The Art of Breathing
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