Breathing is something that we all do, every day, all day. It’s one of the simple subconscious tasks that we don’t have to think about doing (until now, where I’ve just made you conscious of it…). Given that, how would you feel if I told you that many people are either breathing wrong or not unleashing the full power of what the breath can do for them.
Well, it’s time to introduce you to the power of breath work. This blog is firstly going to explain to you what you may be doing wrong when it comes to breathing, which by the fact you’ve made it this far in life, you’re probably puzzled by how that could be the case. From that basis, I will explain some simple ways for you to improve how you breathe in everyday life before I go on to give you an overview of some basic breathing modalities I’ve been introduced to and the powerful effects that they can have on you.
What Are People Doing Wrong
To be able to start making changes in our lives about the habits that we have subconsciously, we must first become conscious of our incompetence so that we can start becoming consciously competent, eventually becoming subconsciously competent. With that being said, you may still be wondering how people could be breathing wrong? Surely if they are alive, they are doing it right.
Well, yes and no. The concept of getting air into the lungs is a bare minimum when it comes to breathing but it’s actually in the pathway that it takes and which area of the lungs that people will be getting it wrong.
We should be breathing in through our noses. The nose is “designed” specifically for this task. Let’s get into some biology for a moment. The first and obvious feature within the nose (and something that people like to get rid) are the hairs. These are there to filter the air you’re breathing by catching larger particles. As you go further down your respiratory tract, the hairs do get smaller but the whole way is lined with them, ready to bring a premature end to the journey to your lungs for any particles or pathogen. These hairs team up with your mucous (that lovely stuff we call snot) to then send it back where it came from, or to be killed in your stomach.
Another feature that we have for filtering the air are the folds we have which cause turbulence, spinning the air to “throw” the particles to the edges of the nasal cavity to be caught by the hairs and removed. Inside the nose has a couple of other jobs, such as having a high amount of blood flow around the area to cool or heat the air we are breathing to the right temperature for our lungs
The other main mistake that people make when it comes to the breath they take is how much of the lungs they fill. You have two types of breath. The first one is that which moves the chest up and down, feeling quite shallow when you take it and usually accompanies a breath taken through the mouth. With this type of breath, you aren’t fully filling your lungs and selling yourself short with how much air you can take in. Did you know that breathing using your diaphragm has other benefits too? Yes, it will guide you to breathing fully but there are other physiological processes that it supports. It allows the pelvic floor to relax when you take a full breath in. If you’ve not been breathing fully for a while, you may feel some sort of resistance in that are of the body. It also massages the digestive system’s organs to keep things moving in a health manner.
This is just a small insight into what breathing well and breathing badly can do for you but enough to show you that if you get this simple unconscious process wrong, it can have a knock on effect to various other health factors and bodily processes.
Ways To Improve Your Breathing
We are at the stage that you should be consciously incompetent with your breathing and in the last section you became very aware with how you’re actually breathing. Now it’s time for us to become consciously competent with two very easy to implement steps to change how. you breathe thus how you feel. Whilst you read this blog, you’ll be able to make the changes as you go through the rest of it but as you go off to do other tasks day to day, you’ll forget and potentially go back to the old ways. This is why some like employ a small piece of tape over the lips to keep themselves conscious of it until it’s second nature. That’s something for you to weigh up and potentially do whilst you’re at home.
The first thing you’re going to do is simply close your mouth and take your breaths completely in and out of your nose. This may seem a little odd and unfamiliar to some after so long doing it another way but trust me, it’ll become second nature. As you do this, you may notice that your breath becomes a bit slower and starts going deeper into your lungs. The way to really tell if this is the case is if your stomach rises and falls instead of your chest. This is you properly using your diaphragm, giving you the benefits that I spoke of before.
The next stage to really solidify you breathing into the right part of your body is by trying to expand just your stomach and even your pelvic floor with each breath. This will ensure that you are moving back towards correct and full breathing technique with each breath. Things should slow down, the breaths will be deeper and whether you’re aware of it or not, your blood pressure and heart rate will start to lower along with other bodily systems associated with stress, putting you into rest and digest state.
I could get technical into other breathing modalities that you could use for down regulating and calming yourself down but that’s for once you have the basics and start exploring the practitioners that I recommend later on.
For the rest of this blog, the aim is for you to keep this breathing pattern, checking it with it at various points and if you notice you are starting to waiver, take a moment, return back to the breath and then continue reading.
What Else Can The Breath Do
The breath is something that we typically know and love for allowing the process of respiration and sustaining our life. Without it, we know we wouldn’t be around for very long. Already it’s an amazing thing but did you know that it can do more for you? Crazy I know but let me tell you what else the breath can provide you, which I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing myself at various stages of my life.
Trauma Release
This was a very powerful experience that brought a lot of peace to me without me realising it was something that I really needed. This experience was at Tony Riddle’s 100 Human Experience, which hosted a variety of other mind blowing activities. This one in particular was led by a great breath work coach called Artur Paulins. With him setting the pace of the breathing and ways of doing it, giving guidance on where you should feel it, the session developed.
With no idea what to expect on the other side for myself, though I’d seen a few videos of previous iterations of this event, I allowed myself to relax into it as much as possible. The more I relaxed, the more the body and mind let go of various tensions. Around me, there were an array of experiences from those in attendance, from people shouting out to hysterical laughter to what I had: uncontrollable tears. I had a very vivid mental image of what I was holding trauma about which sparked the tears.
It was hard to not judge myself in this moment. As a man, the concept of crying isn’t that accepted in the collective (especially noting my military background) and I was around 99 strangers that I wasn’t 100% comfortable being vulnerable around. However, I did my best to step out of the way of myself and allow the tears to flow, releasing the trauma that I had held within me.
Two things I distinctly remember afterwards were that:
- Being a lot more at peace with myself and how I felt in the world after this experience. I felt like I had really let go of something in the moment.
- As if a mental and physical vice had been removed from. Mentally, I felt like a weight had been released and “space” that was taken up had been restored. Physically, it was like a tension had been removed from my diaphragm that had been there for all too long. Almost like I had a knotted ball that had finally released.
With the power that something like this holds, I know that everyone needs to go through this process and likely on a regular basis to expel some of the demons and problems that they have held within them for what could be year. I know where the tension had come from and why I was holding it and I had been hold it for nearly 6 years so you can imagine the relief I felt afterwards.
Pause. How are you doing with the breath? Through the nose and nice and deep? Good, carry on! If not, take a moment to yourself.
(Active) Meditation
Even for the uninitiated, everyone knows that the very basic form of meditation is through sitting still with your eyes closed and concentrating on your breath going in and out without interfering much yourself. The principles are that you are very passive in what’s happening and not actively doing something, whether this be attaching to the thoughts that come up or changing your breathing pattens.
Then you have breath work, where you are taking more control of the intensity and pace of your breathing pattern to bring about a certain state for yourself. For me, this has often brought about a meditative state whilst actively doing something. It’s not quite active meditation in the eyes of some, who perceive it as where you are moving within a space.
For myself, I find when I’m concentrating on having to hold a certain breathing pattern with a certain intensity, I forget about everything else, bringing about that meditative state thus gaining all the benefits of meditation as well as the physiological ones from the pattern I’ve elected to do. From this, the main two positives that I get from getting into a meditative state are:
- Bring focus & clarity of mind – We have so much mental chatter going on in our heads the builds and builds throughout the day, weeks, months, years. We are trying to solve problems, plan for life ahead, worrying about what happened that time back at secondary school when you wish you didn’t do X; there’s a lot going on in our heads. All that can be turned down and gotten rid of in a meditative state, allowing you to have clarity and be able to concentrate on the things that really matter. This can also lead to…
- De-stress – When you stop worrying and thinking about all the things that you should do, need to do and shouldn’t have done, the mind can rest and stop the arousal signals to the body to react through your fight or flight mode. OK, it’s a little different to when we were on the savannah and trying to eat and not be eaten but it’s the same system in the body. When we reduce the stressors, we reduce the arousal signal, reducing the amount of cortisol and adrenaline flowing resulting in us going from flight or flight to rest and digest.
Positive Emotion Amplification
This is probably a byproduct of the clarity of mind and removal of all things negatively affecting you. It leaves the positive emotions within you to be released and amplified, allowing you to properly feel them within your natural state. That’s one side of it but for me, I had something that was somewhat more than that. One day when I was doing the Wim Hof breathing modality, I had a mental image of light breaking through the dark wall that was in front of me. As I stepped into the light, I had this sense of bliss and coming to be at peace with myself and life at the moment. From there, I had this sudden overwhelming feeling of being content and wanting share all the love I had for friends and family with them.
Here I am with another check in. Still on it with the breathing pattern? This is for your benefit and health, you'll thank me later.
Experiences You Can't Explain
Experiences You Can’t Explain
There’s one experience that once happened to me that is hard to explain and I’m still unsure what the meaning of it could be but it will stick with me. After doing a particular type of breathing that was mouth only, during the part where you are just left with your thoughts and your own breath, I had a very weird experience. Some would maybe call it an out of body experience.
In my minds eye, I started zooming out. From my body to the room; the room to the outside the house; the house to the county; the county to the nation, the nation to the world and then just onwards until all I can describe it as was like I was time warping in Star Trek with stars and galaxies flying past me. The moment I became conscious of this, I stopped momentarily before rushing back to my body.
It doesn’t stop there.
However, when I returned to my body, I was standing by a log cabin next to a lake on the edge of a forest. Surrounding this log cabin were a variety of bells, chimes and cymbals. I slowly walked up to these and would individually touch them. But what was weird about this was, the song that was playing in the real world, containing an assortment of bells, cymbals and chimes being played, was matching what I was touching in my mind’s eye at the exact moment that I was “playing” them. Very weird experience for sure.
As I say, I’m still not sure what this mental image or journey was trying to tell me but if anyone is able to work out some sort of meaning from it, I would be very grateful for you to drop a comment down below or to message me on one of my social media pages. I would love to know and have an insight as to what meaning this holds and what the subconscious was trying to tell me.
Ways Into Breath Work
With the knowledge of what different ways of breathing can do for you, I can imagine that the next question for you is where can you start? Don’t worry, I was there once. I know exactly where you can start when it comes to this. As the popularity of this sort of thing rises, there are people have championed it and have some really good resources. Obviously, there will be certain individuals who you resonate with more compared to others so a quick search on YouTube will give you a few suggestions and a free resources.
From my own experience, those that I have come across and resonated the most with, whether it be their way of conducting sessions, their modalities or the philosophy are as follows, with links to them attached:
- Wim Hof – Thrust into the mainstream across the years through his world record attempts, recent TV show in the UK and the various media platforms he’s on such as social media, YouTube and his app. With guided sessions on YouTube or through his app, these are good places for you to start. They are easy to follow and understand and Wim explains everything you need to know about the breathing method. From there, you can build up to his book or paid areas of the app that give you other sessions.
- Artur Paulins – Someone who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and conducting one of his sessions in person, which led me to my trauma release experience. Best found on Instagram, he conducts free sessions occasionally through his Instagram live or you can download a 5 minute guided audio from his website. He also offers a variety of in person or virtual sessions for you to join and take part in.
- Tony Riddle – Mainly featuring on his Instagram page, often through stories or posts, Tony features different breath work modalities that he typically uses to down regulate. He own talks about the use of the Breathing App, which gives you a pattern to follow based on your needs. The largest collection of types of breathing that he has can be found in his book, with a whole section on different types and what they’ll bring you.
We are nearly at the end but I'm hoping that you're still breathing right. You've got this and can continue it on into your day to day life.
I’m hoping that this blog was an insightful one and brought some awareness to not only how you could be breathing wrong but other ways you can breath to bring about certain physiological and mental benefits. As I said before, these are benefits that I have felt myself and know are within the capability of anyone and everyone. It all it takes is taking some time out of your day to simply concentrate on your breath and allowing yourself to clear your mind can bring about a vast array of positives that are both free and completely within you. Whether you decided to use one of the individuals that I listed here to guide your journey or go alone through other means, I wish you luck on embracing better health for yourself.
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