Learning to breathe correctly can have immediate and profoundly beneficial effects. It’s your most underutilized tool to chill out, think clearer, sleep better, balance hormones, reduce stress, anxiety, depression and more. Taking a deep breath can enliven us in the moment, get us centered and grounded, and help us clear the fog and cobwebs of a stressful day. It’s the most direct way to calm our nervous systems and interrupt unhelpful patterns and habits.
A few deep, slow, mindful breaths can enliven us, get us centered and grounded, and help clear the fog and cobwebs of a stressful day. Certainly, deep breathing feels good and has numerous, well-documented benefits.
But is it the healthiest and most natural long-term approach to breathing? Turns out that day-to-day breathing may benefit from being light and shallow.
I’ll start with optimal breathing techniques. For those of you who find the physiology as fascinating as I do, I have explained why these techniques work at the end of the article.
So what is the best way to breathe?
The two most important factors to breathe in a healthy manner long-term are:
- Breathe lightly, quietly and gently through the nose only.
- Breathe slowly and smoothly.
That’s all there is to it.
There are several reasons to breathe through the nose only:
Breathing through the nose leads to slower, diaphragmatic breaths. This helps quiet the mind and relieve stress.
- Mouth breathing engages mostly the upper lungs and chest. However, the greatest concentration of blood tends to be in the bottom lobes of the lungs, due to gravity. Nitric oxide (NO) in the nose and nasal sinuses are carried to the lungs when you breathe through the nose. NO shifts the blood from the lower lobes to the upper lobes of the lungs, which allows for better perfusion (transfer of oxygen to and carbon dioxide from the blood vessels).
- Mouth breathing leads to poor oral health. Breathing through the mouth can dry out delicate tissues in the mouth, leading to dry mouth, sensitive teeth and gums, and greater risk for cavities and gum disease. Read this post to learn more about natural oral care solutions.
- Breathing through the nose activates the diaphragm, which in turn stimulates the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is a major player in the healthy functioning of your parasympathetic nervous system, or the Rest-And-Digest nervous system. The vagus nerve reaches from the back of the brain all the way down to the colon, branching off to the lungs, heart, stomach, spleen, kidneys, liver and more. Correct breathing is critical to the health of this wandering nerve. For more ways to overcome the damaging effects of stress, read this post.
Nitric Oxide for the win!
- Increasing NO is important for other reasons. NO is an important cellular signaling molecule:
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- It helps regulate vascular tone and insulin secretion, airway tone, and peristalsis (the movement of food through the digestive tract).
- NO is involved in angiogenesis (the development of new blood cells) and neural development.
- Endothelial NO synthase (ENOS) helps regulate vascular tone and platelet aggregation, among other things, making it essential for a healthy cardiovascular system.
- Neuronal NO synthase (NNOS) is an important player in memory and learning. NNOS has many other physiological functions, including regulation of cardiac function and peristalsis and sexual arousal.
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- NO in the sinus cavities and nasal passages helps to sterilize incoming air. Other benefits of breathing through the nose include:
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- Warms and humidifies incoming air
- Prevents small particles of dust and pollution from making their way to the lungs.
- Both of these actions of nose-breathing mean cleaner, healthier air reaching the lungs which leads to less irritation of the delicate mucosal lining of the lungs.
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What about when I sleep?
If you find yourself waking up groggy and sleepy most (all) mornings, if you snore, have sleep apnea or wake up with a dry mouth and/or sore throat then you are likely a mouth breather when you sleep. Some helpful hints for nose-breathing at night include the following:
- Try specially designed tape to gently keep your mouth closed while sleeping. After all, you can’t control how you breathe while you’re asleep because you’re, well, asleep. This general first aid paper tape* works great for a fraction of the cost of the specialty tapes.
- nasal dilators* are available to help you breathe through your nose at night. These items may take a bit of getting used to, but getting a good night’s sleep is one of the foundations of vibrant health and energy.
- Practicing calm, slow, mindful, light breathing during the day (as part of a meditation practice or just as its own endeavor) is a great way to be a better breather during sleep.
- Read this post for more tips on how to get your best night’s sleep, starting tonight!
More tips to breathe correctly
- Use a Neti pot on a regular basis. It is a simple saline wash for the sinuses and nasal cavities. This will help you breathe through your nose.
- Breathe through your nose! I know, I know, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Mouth breathing is a habit. Change the habit to breathe through your nose. As you become used to breathing through your nose, you will find that your sinuses are more open and it becomes easier to breathe. NO that is released in the sinus cavities helps to open the airways. When you breathe through your nose on a regular basis this NO is circulated and helps keep airways in the nasal passages as well as the lungs clear.
- Get some exercise. Our sedentary lifestyles (too much sitting, poor posture while staring at screens, lack of regular vigorous movement) set us up for poor breathing patterns. Now you can add better breathing to the long list of benefits we experience from regular movement.
If you want to learn the daily habits that lead to a life of energy and enthusiasm, check out my e-course “6 Weeks to Abundant Energy” HERE.
If you are a physiology geek like myself, here are the details as to why and how the breathing techniques listed above work. Enjoy!
Two key factors that comprise breathing: Volume and Frequency
Volume is the total amount of air breathed in and out within a period of time. Frequency is the breathing rate within that time period. Advanced meditators and yogis, martial art masters, and highly trained athletes all naturally breathe only a few times per minute (3 – 5 breaths / min.) with low total volume of air (2 L / min).
On the other hand, a person under distress (sick, stressed out, anxious, scared, etc) breathes rapidly (20 – 30 breaths per minute) while drawing in a large volume of air (~20 L / minute). Even though the lungs are moving a high volume of air in this state, body tissues can become hypoxic. Hypoxia is a condition where bodily tissue is deprived of adequate oxygen supply, literally suffocating without enough oxygen.
Our bodies can all too easily habituate to this way of breathing, so that it becomes our default setting. And, our breath can become a negative feedback loop. When we are stressed and anxious, our breathing speeds up. When our breathing is too fast due to habitual over-breathing, it causes us to be anxious and stressed, leading to fast breathing, leading to anxiety and stress, leading to… You get the idea. This high volume, rapid breathing tends to be done through the mouth, which has its own set of negative impacts. I’ll get to that in a minute.
A central key to vibrant health and longevity
High oxygenation of our tissues, vital organs and brain leads to vibrant health and energy. Yet, a healthy level of oxygen in our cells can only occur if there is a healthy concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) present in both our lungs and blood. CO2 is not a toxic by-product of breathing. Our breath is naturally light with a low volume of air moving in and out of our lungs when we are calm and relaxed.
CO2 is a primary factor in the process of releasing oxygen from the blood (via hemoglobin found in red blood cells, RBCs) to our cells and in the regulation of our blood pH. Low CO2 levels are called hypocapnia and can lead to lower oxygenation levels in the blood. This is called the Bohr effect. The Bohr Effect describes the process of how hemoglobin releases oxygen to tissue based on CO2 levels in the blood. CO2 Levels in the lungs and consequent levels of oxygen in our cells are directly related to our daily breathing patterns.
Breathing and CO2 regulation is a far more effective regulator of the body’s acid/alkaline balance than food.
Habitual overbreathing and hyperventilation (due to stress, poor diet, and/or chronic mouth breathing) and regularly low oxygen levels in our tissues is highly correlated to:
- heart disease
- cancer
- asthma
- chronic fatigue
- other diseases including psychiatric disorders.
Why Carbon Dioxide is critical to your energy levels
When you take a deep, forceful breath, you will have a correspondingly big exhale. This releases large amounts of CO2. CO2 relaxes smooth muscles in and around blood vessels. Breathing out CO2 and reducing the CO2 concentration in your blood causes your blood vessels to constrict. This in turn impairs blood flow (especially to the extremities) and reduces cells’ ability to take up oxygen. If you suffer from cold hands and feet it may be sign that you are over-breathing!
In the later half of the 20th century, a Russian doctor, Konstantin Buteyko scientifically showed the health benefits of breathing lightly like the yoga masters compared to modern society’s disease linked “over-breathing”. As Dr. Buteyko’s years of research showed that the regular practice of slower, lighter breathing gives us greater tolerance to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in our blood. This allows optimal amounts of oxygen to be released to tissues and cells throughout the body.
To Your Abundant Health & Energy!
