“The wisest one word sentence? Breathe” – Terri Guillemot
How much time do we spend thinking about getting healthy? Improving our sleep, eating more healthily, getting more exercise? How many of us have considered the oxygen we breathe is an essential nutrient for good health? We need to consider the benefits of nasal breathing.
Most people take this for granted. We breathe around 22k times per day and yet we take it for granted that we know how to do this. People often don’t realise is that in the same way you can have too much food or water, you can also have too much oxygen; excess oxygen can prematurely damage your body by causing excess free radicals and yet we kind of take it for granted that our body knows how to breathe and is getting the right amount of oxygen.
We are all born with the ability to breathe properly but many of us learn poor breathing habits and breathing properly takes practice. Breathing properly is essential to good physical and mental health so is worth this investment.
Two major breathing bad habits
Over-breathing
The biggest obstacle to keeping our bodies healthy and our stress in check is chronic over-breathing. Many of us breathe 2-3 times more than we need.
You can check this by observing whether you are breathing through your mouth? Snoring? Do you have a dry mouth on waking? Does your chest move more than your abdomen? Do you sigh for no reason?
If any of these things apply, the chances are you are over-breathing which plays a huge role in our bodies ability to regulate stress.
Our breathing is like a metronome – when we are at ease, it should take exactly the same amount of time to swing to the right as it does to the left. Or in breathing terms, breathing in and out.
Whilst you’re breathing in, your body is in a sympathetic dominant position, that is its prepared for action against threat. When you breathe out, you shift your body into a parasympathetic position to enable it to rest. Ideal breathing keeps your body in a neutral position, swinging gently between the two states like a pendulum, like a metronome. It’s then very easy to shift yourself into action to protect yourself against threat or to switch down a notch to go to sleep.
When we over-breathe, we take in too much oxygen – we fill our bodies with so much oxygen that there isn’t enough space left for carbon dioxide in our bodies. This matters. CO2 is not just a waste gas. It helps our red blood cells release the oxygen so our bodies can use it.
A shortage of carbon dioxide creates the urge to take large gulps of air, worsening the problem rather than solving it. We think we are breathing for oxygen but actually we are craving carbon dioxide to help the oxygen be released and used by the body. Carbon dioxide is the doorway that allows oxygen to reach your muscles. It’s physiologically impossible to increase your oxygen levels in your blood through taking big breaths as our blood is almost always saturated.
Breathing through the mouth
The second bad breathing habit is breathing through our mouths. Mouth breathing activates our fight-flight system. It tells our bodies we are in a state of emergency without there being any real need for more physical exertion.
It activates our upper chest and stimulates our stress response whereas nasal breathing results in abdominal breathing placing us in a calmer state and aiding lymphatic drainage.
When we breathe primarily through our mouth, we miss out on all the health benefits of nasal breathing. Breathing through our noses removes foreign particles like allergens, germs and bacteria.
Our noses are also the only place where nitrous oxide is released. This chemical plays an important role in:
- Opening and closing our blood vessels
- Maintaining our physiological stability
- Strengthening our immune system
- Communicating between our guts and our brains. Most messages go from our stomach to our brain and the majority of serotonin in our bodies (the “feel good” chemical) is produced within our gut.
- Reducing blood pressure and cholesterol
- Maintaining a healthy weight
- Maintaining erectile functioning and female libido
The evidence tells us that abdominal breathing via our nose facilitates brain change almost immediately.
What happens when we breathe correctly?
We swing between sympathetic activation of our nervous system and parasympathetic de-activation creating a pendulum like wave. When we breathe into our abdomen this pushes blood to our legs and arms (fight response), when we breathe out, the blood is pushed upwards to our brain. To keep our minds healthy, we want this energetic movement to be washing our brains with fresh blood
When we rely on chest breathing, our hearts have to work a lot harder to push the blood down to our legs so we end up tiring the heart out.
Practicing “coherent nasal breathing”
This is a great simple practice associated with optimum health as it coordinates our breathing rate with our heart rate and keeps us calm.
With coherent breathing, you’re working towards being able to breathe in and out through the nose with inward and outward breaths of equal duration. You’re ideally aiming to be able to breathe in for 6 and out for 6 (so breathing in and out about 12 times a minute). However, if you’re taller than 6ft, you have bigger lungs so you should aim for longer breaths. If you’ve got into bad breathing habits this will take some practice to achieve but don’t be disheartened as with practice you will get there. Ideally you want to practice for a few minutes several times a day until its something you can do easily and naturally. It’s also a great idea to remind yourself to do this when you’re experiencing something stressful or painful as it can make a huge difference to how you manage.
This blog post was originally posted on the Help to Heal Substack.
