Why breathing?
Yes, breathing is the one action we do every single minute of our lives without having to think about it. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about it. Chances are the only times you think about your breath are when you’re forced to pay attention, like huffing and puffing after some exercise, or seeing it mist up in front of you on a frosty day. Something we all take for granted, a process that just ‘happens to us’… or so we thought. In reality, the breath is linked to almost every single important function in the body, including your: heart rate, nervous system, digestion, hormones, emotions, endurance (I could be here all day, but you get the picture). So a dysfunction with your breathing can have a cascading effect on your overall health.
The average person reading this breathes around 25,000 times a day, or 18 times a minute- in other words, a lot.
Imagine if you you did anything else that much. Let’s take a tennis player, and imagine they practice their serve 25,000 times. After 25,000 reps it would be so consistent that it would become habitual, locked into muscle memory.
Now, we can apply exactly the same concept to the breathing. If we can consciously train healthy breathing patterns, we will reap the benefits just from sheer repetition. And conversely, if we leave our breathing unchecked, bad habits will not only remain, but over time our breathing can become very dysfunctional. But what is dysfunctional breathing?
We only need to look as far the average rate of breathing I mentioned above. Don’t be fooled by the term ‘average’ here, common doesn’t mean the same as normal/healthy by any means. This rate of breathing is much faster than necessary, therefore it is a dysfunction. Over-breathing is a widely known symptom of stress- think how your breath speeds up when you’re scared- but what most people don’t know is that it’s also a cause of stress. Fast breathing, more stress, even faster breathing… and repeat. Pretty vicious cycle, right?
Fast breathing evolved for our benefit as a survival mechanism. If our ancestors came toe-to-toe with a lion, breathing sped up, triggering a stress response, putting the body hyper-alert, ‘fight or flight’ state, ready for action. We evolved to only spend short periods of time in this stressed state, but as a result of our modern lifestyle, many people are living in a milder version of this state all day and night, and as a result are breathing way too much.
Throughout the animal kingdom, a lower resting breath rate is directly correlated with a longer life span. Over a tortoise’s 100 year life span, it will breathe on average 4 times a minute. In contrast, a mouse breathes 50x faster at almost 200 breaths per minute, unsurprisingly the mouse also has a much shorter life span of just 5 years. Perfect illustration of why you should slow it down!
So now you know a little about the over-breathing, but that’s only one of dozens of forms of dysfunctional breathing. Perhaps the other most widespread and damaging: mouth-breathing. Once again, a result of our modern lifestyles. Millions of people today breathe through their mouths practically all day, every day. In some cases it’s obvious, but for most mouth-breathers it’s so subtle and/or habitual they have no idea they’re even doing it.
Before you panic, it’s okay to breathe through your mouth in short bursts! Such as during bouts of intense exercise, or during specific breathing exercises taught by myself and others. The problems only arise when this mouth-breathing becomes chronic, which hugely detrimental to health. We evolved to breath through our noses for a reason!
I am sure many of you will have reflexively paused, and pulled your slack jaws into a closed position, great start!
Now I know that all sounds a little bit doom and gloom- but here’s the good news- you have the power to fix, and even reverse a lifetime of poor breathing habits with the power of breathwork.
Breathwork is simply the use of intentional or conscious breathing techniques, to elicit changes in our being.
Through breathwork, we can experiment with our breathing mechanics to create change. These changes don’t simply occur during the breathwork practice, but also carry over after the practice.Through conscious control of the breath we can break years of bad habits, override our involuntary biological limitations. Such a simple tool that can profoundly transform your health.
Correcting dysfunctional breathing is only the beginning. With these tools we can train ourselves to drift into deep relaxation, become more resistant to stress, focus intensely, reduce inflammation, alter different brainwave states
(the list goes on and on).
In deeper breathwork sessions you will learn to access expanded states of awareness, even reaching states of pure bliss and ecstasy.
All of this, simply by taking charge of this ‘automated’ bodily function. The funny thing is that these concepts are nothing new. Far from it. Ancient humans discovered these secrets thousands of years ago, and finally modern science is catching up and starting to understand the truth behind them..
The best part for you? I
t couldn’t be easier to start for yourself today!