Breathe: the first, last and most important thing you’ll ever do

“The optimal rate of breathing is about 5 or 6 breaths per minute. Unfortunately (but perhaps unsurprisingly) the average rate of breaths for an adult is more like 18 - 20 per minute”.

My summary of Module Four: ‘Breathe’ from The Journey of Intrinsic Health

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Finally, the breath module! I was obviously very curious about this one and it definitely took my understanding of the power of our breath to a whole new level. 

Interestingly, we also learnt how the planet breathes, (yes mother earth has her own respiratory cycle), providing a really beautiful bridge between my consulting work for regenerative brands, and the breathwork. 

Before we get into why your breath is so critical to your health, it makes sense to back up a little and understand how your body breathes.

Have you ever wondered that?

Like, what is it that is causing you to breathe?

What’s keeping it going - automatically - 20,000 times a day? 

Well, we can thank our vagus nerve for that.

The vagus nerve is the largest nerve in our whole system.

The name ‘vagus’ means ‘wandering’ which is pretty appropriate given it travels through, and influences, so many of our body’s internal systems, including our respiratory rate, heart rate, blood circulation, digestion and so on. 

The vagus nerve has two pathways - parasympathetic (which is our ‘rest and repair’ state) and sympathetic (our ‘fight or flight’ state) - and both serve important purposes. 

One of the main ways that you can stimulate the healthy function of the vagus nerve (and therefore your overall health) is through conscious breathing.

Before we go on, I’d like you to consider how you are breathing right now…

Are you taking slower, deep breaths or quicker, shallow breaths?
Are you breathing in through the nose, or through the mouth
Are you breathing into the shoulders? The chest? The belly?

More often than not, most of us are taking short, shallow breaths, through the mouth, and into the upper chest. 

What's interesting about that, is that they are the attributes of how we were designed to breathe in stressful situations. 

It’s how we breathe in a fight or flight response - our breaths become shorter, shallower, through the mouth and into the chest...

We do that because that primes our nervous system to be alert. It puts us into our "survival mode".

The way we breathe is exhausting us

Unfortunately, thanks to our modern day lifestyles, most of us are in this activated, stressful state, most of the time. 

Which is a problem, and quite a significant one. 

The downstream effects of staying in that sympathetic state are that we we accelerate the ageing process, the loss of regulatory hormones (including growth hormones causing you to lose lean muscle), immune function breakdown, and overall biologic decay (also known as ageing!).

Our rate of cellular repair depends on how much time we spend in our parasympathetic state, and the more time we spend here the better.

That’s not to say we never want to be in the sympathetic state - it’s exactly what you want for high levels of physical exertion, like playing sport or hunting or escape from threat.

The key is that we don’t stay there.

Sadly most of us do though. And most of us don’t even realise it. 

Beyond the biological effects of staying in this state, it’s also important to note that we cannot access our full creative potential in a stressed state. 

The parasympathetic system (fight or flight) shuts down our creative mind.

So what can you do about it?

It all starts with your nose. 

You want to be breathing with your nose as much as possible (and especially while you’re asleep).

Why is the nose so important?

Nasal breathing activates the release of nitric oxide which contributes to an anti-inflammatory environment in the body. This is incredibly important. 

When nitric oxide is put into the bloodstream it increases dilation of all the blood vessels, increasing blood flow to all of our essential organs, including our cranial nerves which are the nerves that activate the parasympathetic system, giving the body a sense of safety and relaxation. 

Breathing through the nose also fuels our mitochondria (the little creatures in our cells which generate energy from the food we eat) by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in your cells.

Mouth breathing - which has become increasingly common - is not a benign condition.

When we mouth breathe we change the amount and types of bacteria in our sinus which ultimately then make their way into the gut, disrupting our gut microbiome.

This impacts the immune system and can lead to a range of disease and illness including sleep apnea, asthma, allergies, obesity and many more (not to mention significantly altering the shape of your face over time!)

We can fix and regenerate this 

It may surprise you to know that, regardless of what’s happening in your life, you can let go of the fight or flight response and re-engage the parasympathetic state in the context of pretty much anything.

Just think of the masters of martial arts, warriors and Navy Seals — the best performers and the ones that win are the ones that are able to find that parasympathetic state, even in combat.

There are a ton of controlled breathing techniques that anyone can do, at almost any time or place to re-engage the parasympathetic state. 

The most common one is probably box breathing (aka as square breathing).

This generally involves a 4 second inhale… a 4 second hold… a 4 second exhale… and a 4 second hold - repeated over and over for a few minutes. 

The breath hold in this is important as it reminds the vagus nerve that there’s no rush - there’s no threat.

Interestingly, the optimal rate of breathing for our parasympathetic state has been shown to be about 5 or 6 breaths per minute (which would equate to a 5 second inhale and a 5 second exhale). 

Unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, the average rate of breaths for an adult  is more like 18-20 per minute.  

This is keeping us in the sympathetic state where we are basically continually sipping for air. 

If you mouth breathe while you’re sleeping (a lot of us do!) you may want to consider mouth taping at night. It seems a little strange, but it’s very important and could have a huge impact on not only your sleep quality, but overall health and vitality. 

Breathing during exercise

Nasal breathing during exercise is also important.

Physical exertion generally shifts us into a sensation where we feel like we aren’t getting enough oxygen and so in an effort to get more we start mouth breathing to get more in.

Ironically, this limits our physical capacity as we lose the nitric oxide stimulation that would’ve dilated blood vessels in our brain and body and therefore improved our overall physiologic capacity.  

If you start trying to nose breathe during exercise, you’ll notice that it’s easier to nose breathe when we are doing anaerobic or resistance training - aerobic is harder, but still very much possible. 

Nasal breathing really is a powerful way to improve your performance as well as the speed of your recovery and injury repair.

Doing the (breath)work

Deeper forms of breathwork such as Holotropic breathwork (or HypnoBreathwork which is the kind I facilitate) can be incredibly powerful ways of releasing stress and trauma by releasing the pent up energy and emotion that is deeply rooted in the subconscious and stored somatically in the body. 

These kinds of breathwork are also incredibly effective at activating different regions of the brain, stimulating neurologic function and ultimately enhancing our sense of clarity and creativity. 

While we didn’t really go into any of this in this course (its focus was more on functional breathing), in my experience breathwork is one of the most transformative modalities available to us.

Mother Earth is struggling to breathe

Turns out, we’re not the only ones who breathe. Mother earth has her own respiratory rate.

She breathes twice a day, at dawn and at dusk.

And our global soil systems are her lungs. 

The increasing amount of carbon in our atmosphere is ‘stuck’ there because the earth cannot breathe due to our destruction of the soil (mostly through industrial agriculture and its use of chemicals, monocropping and tillage). 

Today, 97% of the soils of arable lands in the world are considered depleted or severely depleted. 

What that means is that the soil simply cannot breathe. 

Mother Earths’ failure to breathe through her soils is leaving us with ever accumulating levels of CO2, nitric compounds, and toxicity in our atmosphere.

If we want to cool the planet we have to regenerate the soil.

Mother Nature is more than capable or reabsorbing literally all of the carbon in our atmosphere, if only we’ll let her. 

Putting it all together

As always with what I’m learning in this course, the micro is reflected in the macro. 

What we do to our cells and our soil, we do to our bodies and the planet.

What I loved about this module was that it helped me see a clear link - a bridge - between the breathwork I facilitate and the advisory work I do for regenerative brands.

Each is ultimately seeking to help us, and the earth, breathe better.

And when we breathe better, we enhance our wellbeing, creativity and vitality. 

References: 

If you’re interested to learn more, feel free to email me and I can share a ton of reading links and podcasts (too many to list here!)

If you specifically want to learn more about how the way you breathe is impacting your health, I cannot recommend James Nestor’s book ‘Breathe’ more highly. It is very likely to change your life. 

Also, if you’re interested to learn more about just how the planet breathes:
https://www.livescience.com/carbon-sinks-globe-animation