5 Things Everyone Should Know about the Breath

Anyone can benefit from simple breathwork practices. If you are still breathing and able to read this, you can improve your life through breathwork. When we add some basic theory and rationale behind the practices, they become an empowering self-care tool. This, my friends, is the goal.

You are not dependent on your favorite yoga teacher or that exotic vacation for your SELF-care… You have what you need right beneath your nose! Understanding the breath and the science behind it is a powerful way we become more active participants in our health and wellbeing.

Some Benefits of Breathwork include:

Relieve stress
Reduce anxiety
Improve mental focus
Boost digestion
Improve sleep
Balance energy

While I am a huge proponent of yoga and meditation, I have come to view breathwork as the most accessible and practical mindfulness exercise. Because of its high accessibility, it yields immediate results and therefore more effective long-term practice and compliance.

Here’s an analogy that I’ve taken from my own life that I believe many can relate with:

Trail running : Flat road running :: Breathwork : Meditation

Trail running and flat road running can produce near identical physical benefits, yet there is a heightened focus required running in the mountains. Because of the ever-changing terrain, one is forced to be more aware, whereas running on pavement requires less focus and more easily allows the mind to wander.

Breathwork, like running in the mountains, for most people feels more involved than meditation. It’s this extra involvement that leads to less distraction, more presence, and ultimately the benefits of mindfulness practice that we all seek.

Exhausted, yet focused after a big climb during a trail half marathon in Andorra in June. No self judgement nor criticism for the mouth breathing here because I know it’s necessary during rigorous exercise!

Below I summarize 5 things everyone should know about the breath that you can start incorporating into your life immediately to feel the benefits.

1. The nose is for breathing

The nose is for breathing and the mouth is for i) eating, ii) talking and iii) breathing during rigorous exercise.

That simple statement is one worth remembering. Nose - breath, mouth - food and convo. Simple right?

Why Nose Breathing?

Temperature control, humidifies, and purifies the air
Adds friction and control to the breath that increases breath efficiency
Affects quality and quantity of sleep (huge implications)

On rigorous exercise - breathing out the mouth during rigorous exercise is a necessary exception. While we can breathe through the nose at lower intensity exercise, we will cross a threshold in higher intensity training that requires breathing out of the mouth.

2. Engage the diaphragm

Use the primary respiratory muscle to breathe more efficiently and calm your system.

You may be wondering - How do you know you’re using your diaphragm? Answer - Belly breathing. Simply feel the movement in your abdomen as you breathe.

When breathing with the diaphragm: on the inhale the diaphragm contracts down pushing into our organs and creating the expansion in the belly that resembles a balloon being inflated.

The diaphragm is our primary respiratory muscle, so it makes sense that we want to use it! This seems obvious, but there are many of us who are breathing shallow into our chest and suffering from the lack of involvement from the diaphragm.

This shallow chest breathing is considered inefficient and suboptimal for multiple reasons, a few of which include:

Leads to an imbalance between CO2 and oxygen and ultimately less oxygen being absorbed into our muscles, tissues, organs.
Just a fraction of the lung capacity is being utilized
There is a calming effect on our nervous system when we breathe with our diaphragm and the opposite effect when we breathe high in the chest (a stress response).

3. Breathe less

Most of us are chronically overbreathing which brings a host of negative consequences.

Our breath and our nervous systems have become a product of the GO GO GO environments we are living in. Therefore we need to intentionally slow down our breath to initiate the desired relaxation response in our nervous system and receive many of the benefits listed above.

“Just as we have an optimal quantity of water and food to consume each day, we also have an optimal quantity of air to breathe. And just as eating too much can be damaging to our health, so can overbreathing.”
- The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown

4. Carbon dioxide is more than just waste!

CO2 plays a huge role in oxygen absorption and increasing blood flow.

CO2 gets a bad rep, and I’m here to have its back! It’s true that CO2 is a waste product of metabolism, but what’s less widely understood is that we need CO2 for oxygen to be absorbed. Not only this, but CO2 is also crucial in opening the veins (more blood flow) as well as opening the breathing passageways (more air flow).

The problem with the overbreathing that plagues our fast-paced society is that we are expelling too much CO2. When we breathe fast, carbon dioxide levels in the body go down, and when we breathe slow, it goes up.

Breathe Fast: CO2 down

Breathe Slow: CO2 up

Yes, we need to expel CO2, but not all of it! Ultimately, optimal breathing is about balance, and overbreathing pushes us out of it.

5. Be aware of the extremes

Safe, accessible, and balancing practices aren’t the most clickable, yet they are the most practical and needed.

Breathwork, like many things in our society, falls victim to - “if it bleeds, it leads…” Breathwork has received a lot of public attention recently with extreme footage and claims. For example, many have seen Wim Hoff breathing shirtless on top of a glacier followed by swimming in arctic waters. Others may know holotropic breathing or similar practices that market out of body and consciousness-altering experiences.

Instead of talking about why I don’t love those practices getting so much attention, I’ll instead share the philosophy I trained in and have come to deeply resonate with: to offer safe, simple, accessible and science-backed breathwork practices that can be used any time, any place.

I hope to empower individuals to use breathwork practices and their understanding of the science to take their health into their own hands!

No matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how resilient our genes are, how skinny or young or wise we are-none of it will matter unless we’re breathing correctly.
- Breath by James Nestor

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I hope you found these 5 considerations about the breath useful and that you feel more equipped to put this self-care tool into action!

Here’s to becoming more intimate with your nostrils and making your belly dance its beautiful dance on each inhale… And each exhale.

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