When you’re dealing with anxiety, there are few things more annoying than being told to breathe.
Yoga teachers and meditation gurus urging me to take a ‘slow, deep breath’ make me want to punch someone. They say it like they’ve invented the wheel. Come on. We get it, we all need to breathe, but can we move on to the class now?
Now deep breathing is the class in itself. Lately my Instagram feed has had posts by breath work practitioners and illustrations of lungs that look like trees.
I have received a Facebook invite to a free 30-minute session to help me ‘Breathe through Covid’, and I know people who have spent lockdown obsessed with the breathing exercises on the app of the famous wellness guru Iceman Wim Hof, who encourages quick, deep breathing followed by long periods of holding your breath.
There are also new books such as James Nestor’s Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art.
Breathing, it seems, is the new black, the new yoga. Except, of course, breathing isn’t new at all.
The power of deep breathing
Everyone from the Ancient Greeks to the Buddhists, the Hindus to the Native Americans, viewed proper breathing as essential to health. As far back as 400BC, Chinese scholars wrote several books on breath, believing it was both a medicine and a poison depending on how we used it. Pranayama, the yoga of breathing, goes back thousands of years.
What’s relatively new is the body of Western science proving that everything from anxiety to asthma, colds and insomnia can be caused or exacerbated by the poor breathing habits most of us have.
Breathing, it seems, is the new black, the new yoga. Except, of course, breathing isn’t new at all.
On the other hand, advocates claim correct breathing can boost your immune system, improve autoimmune conditions, transform your sleep, even help you lose weight. And now, in the age of Covid, many of us are more aware of our breathing. Hospitals are using breathing techniques to help patients better overcome viral pneumonia.
Meanwhile, Wim Hof — whose motto is ‘breathe, motherf***er!’ — withstands extreme cold, plunging into icy water and climbing Everest in shorts, thanks to his mastery of special breathing techniques. Hof claims his breathing exercises offer a huge boost to your immune system.
One clinical trial in 2014 followed a group of 24 volunteers — including Hof — half of whom employed his unique breathing, meditation and cold practice methods before all were injected with E.coli bacteria. The group following Hof’s method showed no symptoms of fever, pain or shivering.
Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art features incredible stories of how breathing techniques helped 9/11 survivors restore lung damage caused by debris, a grim condition called ground-glass lungs.
Then there’s the schizophrenic woman who treated her hallucinations by breathing more through her right ‘logical’ nostril. Emphysema patients who had been bedridden for years walked out of the hospital after learning how to breathe correctly.
Finally, there’s the story of Katharina Schroth, a German teen who’d been diagnosed with scoliosis and told she would live the rest of her shortened life in bed or a wheelchair. Over five years she developed and used a technique called ‘orthopaedic breathing’. She stretched and breathed her spine straight, then went on to teach hundreds of others to do the same. She ended up dying just three days before her 91st birthday.
How to improve your breathing to tackle anxiety and boost health
So what is good breathing?
Firstly, it involves breathing ‘slow and low’ — which means breathing down into your diaphragm rather then up in your chest. Do this slowly — so breathing in to the count of five seconds and out for five seconds.
Secondly, you breathe in and out through your nose instead of your mouth. About 50 per cent of us breathe through our mouths because of blocked noses. The book argues that through evolution our airways have got smaller to make room for our expanding brains.
You might think it makes no difference — air is air, whether it comes through your mouth or nose. However, breathing through your mouth saps the body of moisture, irritates the lungs and doesn’t deliver oxygen around the body effectively. The nose, on the other hand, filters, heats and treats raw air. Inhaling through the nose stimulates the release of hormones and nitric oxide, which helps regulate blood pressure and increase oxygenation throughout the body.
Just a few minutes of inhaling and exhaling through the nose has been found to lower blood pressure by up to 10 or 15 points.
However, there are different breathing exercises for different purposes — breathe more quickly, as Wim Hof suggests, to stimulate your nervous system. Breathe more slowly to calm down — which is why slow, deep nose breathing is so good for people with anxiety.
Through the day when I’m working I often breathe in a fast, shallow way. According to the book, this keeps the body in a state of high alert — which is fine when we need to fight a burglar but not good when we are permanently breathing this way. So I tried low and slow, setting a timer on my phone to remind me every hour. Breathing in this way throughout the day has made me feel calmer and less frazzled in my head.
There’s also the Butekyo method, which involves putting surgical tape on your mouth at night to make sure you breathe through your nose in bed. People swear it makes them sleep better and wake up feeling more refreshed. I haven’t gone that far yet.
I am, however, humming when I cook. Humming boosts production of nitric oxide, which plays a role in immune function and indigestion. It’s too early to say if breathing slow and low will change my life but this week I have felt calm and clear-headed.
So maybe breath work isn’t just a load of hot air after all.
Breathing exercises to tackle anxiety and more
Different kinds of breathing
Pranayama
Breathing techniques are key to yoga. Breath retentions, alternate nostril breathing and explosive exhales are used to calm or invigorate the body and support yoga poses, and are considered integral to reaching enlightenment.
4-7-8 breathing
Designed to reduce stress and help people sleep, it involves inhaling through the nose for four seconds, holding your breath for seven seconds, breathing out through the nose for eight seconds.
Holotropic breathwork
A psychotherapy approach which uses rapid deep breathing and music to induce an altered state that allows you to release emotions and trauma. Considered unsafe for those with heart disease, high blood pressure and mental health issues.
Butekyo method
A controversial alternative therapy that uses exercises and mouth taping to train people to breathe lightly and nasally.
Wim Hof method
Cycles of controlled hyperventilation, extended exhalations and breath-holding, combined with exposure to cold and meditation.
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