Take a breath and feel better
For most of my childhood, I struggled to breathe. I just couldn’t get the air in or out. My throat would constrict and my body would heave as I tried to inhale or exhale — asthma is scary. So, the whole concept of conscious breathing has really captured my curiosity. So much so that it’s something I now practice on a daily basis (and teach others, too).
Did you know that the way we breathe affects our emotions? It’s actually quite fascinating. Yogic practices incorporate forms of breathing known as pranayama (in Sanskrit prana means “life force” or breath and ayama means “expansion”). In Western psychology, many of these techniques have also been adopted to help patients manage stress and to cope with negative feelings.
Painful emotions such as shock, distress, sorrow or despair can create a sense of mental constriction. They can also produce direct sensations in the body, including tightness in the chest and shortness of breath. But witnessing or experiencing something so beautiful or awe-inspiring can also literally “take our breath away”. It can transport us into a heightened and more expansive state of being.
And this is the aim of pranayama — it’s designed to shift the mind and body out of heavier or more negative feelings and into a place of greater psycho-emotional wellbeing. In traditional Chinese medicine, it is also believed that parts of the body correspond with different emotions — our lungs are thought to be the place where sadness and grief get trapped.
Have you ever experienced the paralysing grip of anxiety? You know, the feeling when your heart races and your breath becomes shallow, your nervous system clicks over into hyper-arousal, ready to flee danger, or perhaps you might freeze up. This is fear. It produces a kind of neurochemical tripwire in your body.
It’s as though your mind has taken over your body. Well, as it turns out, it kind of has. While many of us are familiar with the internal dance (or rather hardcore techno rave) of anxiety, scientific understandings about how thoughts and emotions affect our physiology are really starting to gain ground.
Decades of neurobiological research are now producing fantastic evidence to support the use of controlled breathing for psychological and emotional health. And this may give further credibility to the enormous trend in “breathwork” (aimed at altering consciousness, regulating emotions and healing past psychological challenges) that we’re starting to see in the global wellness industry.
Scientists at the Stanford University school of medicine have discovered that there is a direct connection between the part of the brain that regulates emotions and breathing. The research team also identified a cluster of neurons located quite deep in the brainstem. They link respiration with states of relaxation and calmness, or with arousal including excitement and anxiety. According to Dr Mark Krasnow, professor of biochemistry, studies have been able to provide a “cellular and molecular understanding” of how controlled breathing can impact health.
So, perhaps the cure for many of our modern ills is simply learning to breathe better.
If you’re feeling stressed, anxious or sad, take a pause. Place your hands on your heart, or one hand on your belly and the other on your chest. Breathe deeply, hold. . . and then let go (and repeat). Most mindful breathing practices are safe. However, please be careful if you have any blood pressure, heart or lung issues as some intense techniques can actually make you dizzy, or even pass out in extreme cases.
We all breathe on autopilot. But consciously breathing could be a way forward for improving our mood and enhancing our overall wellbeing.
This article was first published in The West Australian in Renée Gardiner’s weekly column in Agenda, 24 July 2021.