I am a bit fanatical about breathing. As I write this, I am listening to an audio track that supports me in aligning my breath in a coherent rhythm while I focus and feel into how and what I desire to express for this post. Knowing how to honor and listen to what my breath is informing me of, while also practicing and guiding my breath to achieve specific states and regulation, has become my superpower. And, it tickles and nourishes me to continue learning and exploring the implications in my own life as I share and teach those around me who have an urgency or curiosity to know their breath and nervous system more intimately too.
While I don’t suspect that everyone needs, or would benefit from, a massive intervention in how they are breathing, for me, it was essential. I used to spend most of my day lost/stuck in the negative meanderings of my mind, or acting out to avoid or escape my mind. I was a classic over-breather, which for me would lead into a shutdown response and under-breathing (i.e. shallow breath and occasional apnea while I was awake).
Knowing the breath intimately requires exploring many facets and relationships at play. It is possible to tap into a reservoir of creative energy and a tangible way to practice expanding time spent in presence, calm, connection, flexibility, and ultimately, self-control balanced with surrender. Doesn’t that sound nice?
Your breath is powerful
"Altering our breaths' depth, rhythm, and rate changes our attitude, perception, and stress level. In essence, to have breathing patterns at all is to be experiencing imbalances in some way. When in health, the human body is constantly adjusting itself around optimal homeostatic ranges and will therefore constantly adjust the depth and frequency of breathing to meet the demands incurred internally and externally (through changes in activity and environment)." - Trevor Yelich
The brain and body are prediction systems, so the breath is predicting or anticipating what’s coming based on past experience and the changing sensations and signals of danger and safety that are received beneath the level of conscious awareness (i.e. neuroception). For someone who struggles with chronic stress or chronic lethargy, they way they breathe can be keeping them stuck rather than being the force of freedom that it’s capable of.
The breath shows us what is going on inside, it is like a window that gifts us in-sight into the current state of our nervous system and explains behavior, thoughts, postures in the body, and the perspective(s) you have access to. Or in other words, your psychology resides in your physiology. How you breathe dictates how you perceive and how you show up in each moment.
Breathing is regulated by a fundamental system in the brainstem which is communicating with all other systems of the body. It is your physiology that is driving the pace, rate, tone, and quality of your breath (specifically your inhale) while it also informs the fundamental functioning of your psychology.
Your inhale, from that perspective, is the necessary dose of energy your body is mapping out for anticipatory performance. If your body is sensing danger (even just through thought alone), it will signal the breath to be prepared for action by breathing quick, shallow, and/or with tension. If you are stuck in a nervous system state, your breath will match what the nervous system is sensing and communicating.
When we bring awareness to our breath, we can notice the stuck patterns in our nervous system and slowly guide and reshape the way our body meets stressful moments and efficiently come back to a regulated state. If our breath remains quick, shallow, tense, or stuck in any way, we increase activation and spend more and more time in dysregulated states.
What is it to breathe optimally?
Ideally, each breath you take is appropriately meeting the needs of the moment, gifting you energy for action and guiding your body to let go of what is no longer needed. On the inhale, your respiratory diaphragm glides downwards, you open and receive the nourishment and vitality of breath, bringing in oxygen that travels into your blood to be moved and received by the busy tissues that require oxygen and glucose. And on every exhale, your diaphragm glides back up to be relaxed in its neutral place tucked up in the rib cage, you release tension and effort, your heart slows down, you breathe out the refuse that is then recycled in the external environment. It is a constant dance and relationship with internal and external, effort and surrender, utilize and recycle, receive and release, etc.
While it is healthy and normal to have stressful encounters in your day, a healthy system is one that meets the stressor and then efficiently regulates back to calm connection.
A breath that resonates as calm and connected will have some predictable qualities:
Light, soft and deep through the nose; resulting in around 6 seconds in and 6 seconds out with ease, averaging 6-10 breaths per minute
A relaxed belly so that the respiratory diaphragm is loose and pliable, supporting a healthy heart and lymphatic system. A 3D/horizontal expansion in the front, sides and back of the low torso, versus a vertical lift on the inhale.
The breath moves rhythmically and smoothly, it is not controlled and manipulated, it is simply guided while honoring the innate wisdom of the breath
Yet, so many of us experience something vastly different with our breath. Our breath gets stuck, or we brace against the inhale, or we struggle with letting go of the exhale, or we feel short of breath and the urge to inhale comes in with uncontrollable force, or we hold our breath to muffle our expression or numb our feelings, or we breathe fast when it’s not objectively necessary, or we simply don’t pay attention to our breath at all and vacate our body more and more as life continues.
There is so much potential for power, self-control and more pleasure in life when we learn to befriend our breath.
Why we stop breathing well….
"Stored stress and trauma can be viewed as an incomplete cycle. Something stimulated the person's flight, flight, or freeze response system and they were unable to see the process all the way through to a natural discharge of this energy.
Shifts in breathing - the constriction, bearing down, and suspension of breath - are functional at the moment of encounter with the stressor. They serve a distinct purpose and are part of a larger cycle. when we are able to complete the cycle by discharging the nervous system and return to a parasympathetic state, we are able to avoid any long-term fallout from the encounter. It is when we are unable to clear this charge due to personal, relational, or environmental inhibition, that we begin storing the nervous system charge.
Succinctly put, we restrict our feelings by restricting our breathing."
- Trevor Yelich, NUMA Somatics
For people who live in chronic activation, when they begin to experience parasympathetic (relaxation), their physiology kicks in with discomfort and symptoms because they begin to feel what they have been “running from“ and “protected from.“ Learning how to slow down and feel without being overwhelmed by what we feel is important and challenging at times. It can appear simpler and more convenient to continue pushing big emotions away and avoiding the internal landscape, however, this leads to more and more disconnection and eventually a life spent in the mind rather than an embodied and pleasurable existence of flexibility and growth.
When hyperventialtion becomes habitual or long-term, overbreathing continues even when the primary cause or trigger is removed. Overbreathing results in a narrow window of tolerance; i.e. quick to strong emotional reaction, lethargy, incoherent thinking, struggle in problem solving, sticky repetitive low-quality thinking, and difficulty making changes in lifestyle.
What is "over-breathing"?
Overbreathing refers to a habitual breathing pattern of more inhales and exhales than necessary or healthy. A "big breath" or fast breath is "over-breathing." Breathing more inhales does not equate to optimizing oxygenation or having more sustainable energy that can be utilized. The key here is to understand that breathing more means we are expelling more CO2 than necessary, which lowers the CO2 levels in lungs and blood, which reduces the delivery of O2 from the hemoglobin, all bodily organs and systems.
"I realized that breathing was like rowing a boat: taking a zillion short and stilted strokes will get you where you’re going, but they pale in comparison to the efficiency and speed of fewer, longer strokes."
- James Nestor, Breath
What are potential signs of Over-breathing?
-mouth breathing throughout the day, or waking from sleep with a dry mouth
- audible breath at rest
- excessive yawning
- excessive sighs or sniffing
- feeling short of breath as soon as physical/emotional exertion increases
- breathing habitually with upper chest
- heavy breathing during sleep
- unconscious holding of the breath (awake or asleep apnea)
"When you breathe heavily, oxygenation of your brain significantly decreases...By breathing calmly and quietly, you will retain healthy levels of CO2 and your blood vessels and airway will remain open and clear." - Patrick McKeown, The Oxygen Advantage
What does Carbon Dioxide have to do with it?
On every exhale you release carbon dioxide (among other things), therefore decreasing the levels of CO2 in your body. Depending on how hard your body is working in this moment, your carbon dioxide levels increase as the byproduct of metabolism. However, we do not want or need to breathe out all of our carbon dioxide. In fact, carbon dioxide is essential in the body in order for our blood to release oxygen and other important nutrients.
Without enough carbon dioxide in your body, your blood cells tighten and hold onto the oxygen. Which means, you could have 99% blood oxygen level and if you do not also have enough carbon dioxide, your vital organs and systems will be oxygen deprived.
The impulse to breathe in is dictated by your relationship and current levels of carbon dioxide. The respiratory pattern generator in your brainstem - which informs your body how to breathe without you paying attention to it - is coordinated by the changing levels of carbon dioxide in your body. A low tolerance to carbon dioxide results in a breath pattern that remains quick, as the CO2 levels rise you are triggered to expel it at a quicker rate. If you have a high tolerance to carbon dioxide, your breath can remain slow, steady and calm on a more consistent basis as your body does not receive the signal to expel CO2 at an urgent rate. Therefore, a higher tolerance to carbon dioxide allows for a naturally slower and more nourishing breath.
Higher tolerance to CO2 allows for more time being present, open, flexible, and able to connect and regulate as you meet the changing demands moment by moment.
If you are a habitual over-breather, your body has acclimatized to lower levels of CO2 and your impulse and sense of urgency to inhale is stronger. This keeps you in a pattern of over-breathing, unless you are consciously practicing slowing your breath down and increasing your tolerance to CO2 by meeting mild air hunger.
Take a moment to pause and feel your breath. Notice how it can get slower and more nourishing as you stay with it. Guide it in ways that support a soft, deep, and light rhythm. Notice the space at the bottom of the exhale, the momentary pause or hover in emptiness, and then that subtle urge arises to inhale. That urge to breathe in is dictated by your current carbon dioxide baseline.
A slow and soft breath at rest harmonizes and replenishes every system in your body, and is necessary for anyone who desires optimal health and well-being. And if you are a chronic over-breather, you may experience difficulty in slowing your breath down because your body is hyper-sensitive to carbon dioxide and the urge to continue breathing fast actually feels more comfortable and natural.
An amazing article by Peter Litchfield highlights the complex nature of respiration and details on the adverse effects of improper breathing.
On the effects of chronic over-breathing, he says:
“The basic outcomes of these changes in physiology are brain hypoxia (oxygen deficit), brain hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), and metabolic (lactic) acidosis in neurons, all of which can profoundly alter overall brain function. Besides unfortunate physiological outcomes (e.g., headache, ischemia, triggering of neurological syndromes), these outcomes can have immediate effects on attention, motivation, emotion, cognition, learning, memory, personality, performance, and consciousness.
Examples of psychological changes, from a downside perspective, include: emotional vulnerability, anxiety, anger, fear, panic, phobia, apprehension, worry, crying, low mood, dissociation, disorientation, dizziness, fainting, confusion, hallucinations, attention deficit, learning deficits, poor memory, brain fog, inability to think, low self-esteem, and undesirable shifts in personality.
On the other hand, from a consciousness perspective many of these “negatives” can lay the groundwork for important “positives.”
The ways in which a specific person responds to these changes are highly variable and are dependent upon physiological status, life circumstances, personality, immediate social situation, and especially personal psychological history. For example, disorientation and dizziness, as a function of oxygen deficit, may trigger fear or anxiety in one person and relief or relaxation in another. These differences are based on unique personal histories involving specific experiences in specific situations.
Dissociation and state change are key players in how people respond to breathing mediated physiological changes. Dissociation, although considered to be negative from some perspectives, really means no more than a state change in consciousness, that is, an “altered” state in which, as in the case of psychoactive substances, people can access and experience themselves, others and the world from new, different, and revealing perspectives.
Intentional state change through overbreathing can set the stage for life altering and spiritual experiences, for uncovering and triggering traumatic memories that provide for working through painful episodes in life, and for discovery of dysfunctional habits and the effects they produce when triggered during times of challenge (e.g., 60% of the ambulance runs in the big US cities).”
Reshaping the nervous system, where to start…
A simple tool to start with comes from the work of Deb Dana, who suggests that as we notice our breath and the nervous system state that is informing the breath, and then ask ourselves:
"In this moment, in this place, with the person/people I am with, is this nervous system state needed?"
That simple tool of self assessment is a gamechanger in learning to notice and practice regulating and coming back to calm connection.
Breathwork is not just about relaxation. It’s about all states, about engaging in the world without being constantly defensive or blocked from feeling the full range of emotions and breathing rhythms. The problem is, so many people are operating daily in the mid range of activation without knowing how or the importance of oscillating between the rhythms of high workload and effort as well as true relaxation. Many people get stuck in a narrow bandwidth that doesn’t include for high sympathetic activation or parasympathetic downregulation, and leads to a lot of sameness, stuck-ness and struggle. This is why we practice activating breath techniques and calming techniques, so to experience the emotions in that range of activation, inducing high intensity experiences which then leads the body to fully let go and shift into parasympathetic recovery and repair.
Knowing the breath allows us to regulate and assist in shifting states while expanding the window of tolerance or Social Engagement System. We can develop a rhythm with life versus one speed that dominates, escalates and then leads to shut down.
Freedom is in flexibility, the full range of the breath, and a posture of friendliness towards all feeling states. Recognize the difference between natural physiological reactions, like activation or mobilization with fear, and the layers of habit we correlate them with. Some emotions, beliefs, and/or reactions become stuck together. Some people avoid anger, sadness, etc. because they habitually perceive it as wrong or not supposed to be there. Which is why super activating breathwork can be so liberating. It’s about safely sensing the fluctuations of the parasympathetic and sympathetic, and tuning into the rhythm that arises when we trust our breath and allow the moment to be what it is - without "stories" or getting stuck. Meeting the sympathetic range of arousal with the openness and ease of the parasympathetic.
Interested to dive deeper and tune into optimizing your rhythm?