3 Profound Health Benefits of Deep Breathing and How to Achieve Them
How this seemingly automatic behaviour helps you control your mind
Small changes can lead to profound benefits and improvements. Likewise, they can also massively affect your negatively. You might automatically think of habits such as setting out your clothes the night before to prevent decision fatigue. You will notice a significant decrease in anxiety when you plan tomorrow’s tasks.
But there’s one thing you need to change if you want to see improvements in every part of your life.
You need to change the way you breathe.
“Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
You probably take your breath for granted. You might think that breathing is automatic and thoughtless. If that sounds familiar, you and many others living in the Western world, have been breathing the wrong way. And your health is suffering for it.
Think about the last time you watched a sleeping baby breathe. Babies take deep, relaxing breaths from the abdomen. This is the correct way to breathe.
When we’re younger, proper breathing is natural. However, we change the way we breathe as we age. Now, your breath is shallower and not relaxing, and over time negatively affects your health.
“Long-term shallow breathing can actually keep the body in a cycle of stress, affecting everything from mental to physical health and even susceptibility to illness. While we shouldn’t stay in a prolonged state of controlled breath, starting the practice for a few moments per day can make you more conscious of your habits outside of the exercise.” Headspace, mindfullness app
Taking on a deep breathing practice can help you in different situations in life. These are the biggest benefits you’ll reap once you start a mindful breathing practice.
1. Deep Breathing Mitigates an Unnecessary Fight or Flight Response
Before modern society emerged, humans were not the apex predator. They faced threats such as hostile animals or exclusion from their protective groups. When they were faced with a threat, they had to act quickly in order to survive.
This evolved into the fight or flight response, which is mediated by your sympathetic nervous system. This is a physiological response, mediated by different parts of your nervous system, to keep you safe from a perceived threat. For example, it allows diminishes carbon dioxide buildup and lets more oxygen into your body, very useful for engaging in aggressive or avoidant behaviours.
This was very useful for our ancestors, who feared getting eaten by tigers and quickly responded to threats from neighbouring groups. However, it hasn’t evolved to fit our modern-day stressors.
When you are engulfed with crippling fear about a presentation coming up, that’s your sympathetic nervous system telling you that the danger you’re facing is just as bad as a tiger that wants to eat you. It doesn’t matter if the tiger is just a presentation. Your brain hasn’t evolved to tell the difference.
Deep breathing helps intervene in the sympathetic nervous system and increases your baroreflex sensitivity, helping you calm down and stay calm.
How? The brainstem controls some motor functions related to fight or flight. When you engage in a deep breathing exercise, a section of the brainstem called the periaqueductal gray (PAG) acts as a mediator. It takes note of your breathing, and its neural circuits send instructions to other brain areas to operate in accordance with your breathing.
- If your breath rate is rapid, it will tell other areas of your brain to act as if there’s a threat.
- If your breathing is slow and deep, it recognizes this as a state of rest. It tells other brain areas that you are not in danger.
The brain stem controls breath control, heart rate, nervous sweating, and other somatic factors related to anxiety. When you practice deep breathing, you force your brain to concentrate on your new breathing pattern and override your anxious reaction.
A consistent, long-term breathing habit will result in two positive outcomes for your anxiety. It will decrease
- the frequency of anxiety and
- the intensity of anxiety
Long-term deep breathing, then, helps you forge new neural pathways that positively affect your mental health.
2. Deep Breathing Improves Your Focus
Think about the last time you felt anxious. Were you able to focus on the task at hand? Especially if the task was the cause of your anxiety?
As mentioned before, rapid breathing can induce feelings of anxiety. Controlled breathing regulates noradrenaline, a chemical messenger that affects our attention. Too little noradrenaline, and you feel lethargic. But too much, and you feel frantic. It’s a delicate balance.
In a breath and attention study, researchers monitored participants’ breathing patterns along with their locus coeruleus, a region in the brainstem that makes noradrenaline. When the participants focused on breathing consistently, their focus improved, and they performed better on the demanding task. Consequently, the participants who had inconsistent breathing patterns didn’t perform as well.
They also found that activity in the locus coeruleus increased slightly on inhales, and decreased slightly on exhales. This suggested that regulated breathing has psychophysiological effects on your attention.
When you feel your attention slipping, try the technique below.
- If your attention is flitting but your state of arousal is at rest, then take deep “belly breaths” inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. Use a balanced count structure, like in box breathing, and gently bring your focus to your breathing and the physical sensations you feel during this.
3. Deep Breathing Helps Your Body Rest and Relax
Your sympathetic nervous system has a counterpart: the parasympathetic nervous system. This system, unlike the sympathetic one, is responsible for bodily functions involved with relaxation. These two systems are two sides of the same coin: one is responsible for revving you up, and the other responsible for slowing you down. The two systems can’t be active simultaneously — when one is active, the other is suppressed.
You can use it to your advantage after an intense workout session. If you engage in highly physical activity, you’re activating your sympathetic nervous system. When you finish your workout, your body doesn’t automatically register this. As part of your cool-down, it’s essential to use a breathing technique to get your body relaxed and out of the stressful mode. Breathwork can help with intense, stressful situations as well as an intentionally demanding workout. It enables you to relax from the mental exertion and physical exertion, allowing your body to deliberately go into a relaxing state by activating the parasympathetic nervous system.
You can use the technique below when you need your body to relax.
- If you’re having difficulty relaxing after being in a state of high arousal, such as an intense workout or a panic attack, use a breath control technique such as 4–7–8 breathing. This technique will utilize your parasympathetic nervous system to bring your body into a state of deep relaxation, so it’s great to do before bed or when you’re ready to recharge.
Final thoughts
Breathing is underrated and should be used, intentionally, a lot more often. It’s a way to regulate the brain and ensure that we keep our intense emotions in check. It’s often used in conjunction with mindfulness exercises, but you don’t have to meditate for hours on end to reap the rewards. Investing 5 mins a day, twice daily, can be very helpful in regulating small anxious triggers and allow yourself to feel more mental and emotional freedom from your lizard brain.
Since breathing is something we don’t typically think about on a day-to-day basis, we neglect to take care of our breath. When you incorporate a breathing practice into your daily routine, you can start noticing positive shifts in different ways.
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