Why Controlling Your Breath Leads to Better Health

The other day, my surf buddy was telling me about her smartwatch. She mentioned that it reminded her to breathe. “What?!” was my response. Why would anyone need to be reminded to breathe? We do it automatically, without needing to think or be reminded. Surely the only people who need reminding are long dead. But it turns out I had something new to learn.

My friend let me know that it wasn’t just inhaling and exhaling it was reminding her to do. Oh no, it’s more than that. It’s all about the kind of breathing. Deep breathing, or as it’s sometimes called, diaphragmatic breathing has many benefits. So does simple mindful breathing, following the in and out without trying to change it. How we breathe and where our mind is when we’re doing it can impact our health in interesting ways.

A brief rundown on breathing

When we breathe, air enters our bodies. On reaching our lungs, the oxygen in that air is transferred to our blood and the carbon dioxide in our system is pushed out. This carbon dioxide makes up the majority of our exhalation, but not all of it.

When we exhale, we also let go of other gaseous compounds that our body doesn’t need. Things like volatile organic compounds (VOC’s) – alcohols, acetone, ethanol, methanol and isoprene – are released as are ketones, germs and some hormones. There’s also around 16% oxygen that comes out in our exhalation too. This is because the oxygen-carbon dioxide exchange isn’t a perfect swap.

Most of us know all of that, but it’s only part of the breath story. Our breathing also links our bodies and minds through the nervous system. It influences our hormone levels, turns our parasympathetic nervous system on or off and even affects how we form memories. Who knew our diaphragm was so significant?

There’s more to breathing than oxygenating your blood

How we breathe activates one side of our nervous system while deactivating the other. When we breathe quickly and shallowly, we awaken our sympathetic nervous system. This is the one that uses adrenaline and cortisol to do its bidding and prepares our body for flight/fight responses. Most of the time we don’t have to think about it – it’s a reaction to the stimuli we receive. Loud noises, perceived threats – all of that gets us breathing a little faster.

If you want to get revved up for something you can consciously activate your sympathetic nervous system simply by breathing a little faster.

The parasympathetic nervous system is the chilled out sister of the sympathetic one. The key hormone for this system is the far less famous acetylcholine. It's the key neurotransmitter for controlling homeostasis – balance. It dilates blood vessels, increases our bodily secretions, lowers our heart rate and improves digestion. Slow breathing happens without thinking when we feel safe and secure or are engaged in an activity that doesn’t need us to move much, like reading or watching a movie – as long as they’re not horror or suspense stories.

Just as you can engage your sympathetic nervous system with some quicker breathing, so too can you switch it off and its sister system on, with some slow deep breaths.

Mental benefits of slow and deep breaths

Our mind and body are connected in myriad ways. Most of us know this but rarely pay it much heed. For example, if we see someone we find attractive, our pupils dilate, blood rushes to our skin, and even our tone of voice can change. We can also do the same in reverse - change our physical movements and processes in ways that influence our emotional and mental state.

When we breathe deeply and slowly our vagus nerve is awakened. This is the longest cranial nerve in our body, stretching from the base of your brain through your face and all the way down to your abdomen. Along the way, it branches off to extend to the heart, lungs, liver, stomach and pretty much every other major organ in our body. This nerve regulates the function of our internal organs and also transmits information from those organs to our brain.

It’s a major player in the monitoring of our physical homeostasis and connects the emotional and cognitive areas of our brain with peripheral intestinal functions, such as immune activation and intestinal reflex. That feeling in your gut you think you should listen to is transmitted to your brain by your vagus nerve. Deep breathing will allow your gut and other organs to freely ‘speak’ with your brain.

This brain and body connector helps to regulate our mental state too. By regularly activating our vagus nerve – just with deep slow breathing – we can increase its ‘tone’ and in doing so we can relax more quickly after stressful episodes, increase our levels of dopamine and serotonin (the ‘happy hormones’), and improve mood and mental wellbeing. Another nice side effect of regularly stimulating our vagus nerve is we tend to laugh more.

Remember to breathe – deep and slow

When we’re not thinking about it, nor are we stressed or frightened, our rate of breathing is somewhere around 10 – 14 in-out breaths a minute. There are lots of ways you can slow it down – and you don’t need a smartwatch to do it.

Six a minute. This is a really simple technique. Focus on your breath – when your attention is there breathe in deeply, engaging your diaphragm so that you get a good lungful of air. Now hold it for a short while – not uncomfortably so - and then breathe it out in a ‘whoosh’ through mouth and nose. Hold a short while before repeating. Your aim is to slow your breathing to 6 breaths a minute.

The box technique. Sometimes called square breathing, legend has it that this technique comes from US Navy SEALS. These elite soldiers used it to get to sleep while fighting raged around them – so the story goes. Whether or not this is true, the technique works wonders for getting yourself off to sleep, calming down after a stressful episode, or just waking up your vagus nerve to get it doing its thing.

Inhale slowly using your diaphragm to the count of four (count slowly, with elephants between the numbers). Now hold for a count of four – if you like, replace the elephants with hippopotamuses. Breathe out through your nose for a slow count of four, again engaging your diaphragm to push all the air from your lungs and abdomen. Finally, hold for four and give recognition to America’s widest river between numbers. Repeat this for a few minutes and you’ll feel the benefits, keep going for five minutes and you may end up in the land of nod!

Get curious about your breath. Becoming conscious of our breath without actively trying to change it can also cause it to slow. By actively feeling the air enter and leave our lungs, we’ll begin to notice curious things about our breathing – things we may never have noticed before. The little pause between the out and in-breath, or the sensation of the cool air at the entrance to our nostrils and the tickle on our top lip as it leaves, all of these little things slow us down, and our breath with it. And our vagus nerve wakes up.

Taking time to consciously and slowly breathe throughout our day is great for our physical health and mental wellbeing. There’s no need to buy a smartwatch to do it either. Tie the intention to another habit and it will become second nature. Breathe deeply and slowly while you make your morning coffee, get your lunch and relax into bed each night. Your body and mind will thank you for it.