Take half a minute and focus on your breath. Inhale slowly, through your nose, counting seconds up to six. Then slowly exhale, again counting to six. One more time, inhale. And exhale fully. If that feels good and relaxing, repeat it a few times. Maybe close your eyes.
With that simple exercise, you have just likely lowered your stress, slowed your heartbeat, opened blood vessels and calmed your blood pressure. Just from breathing intentionally.
The potential physiological and psychological benefits of intentional, slow breathing are numerous and far-reaching. Lowering stress and blood pressure on a sustained basis, for starters, can have powerful impacts on health and longevity. If regular breathing practice for a few minutes a day only did those two things, its value would be enormous. In fact, regular breathing practice has far more benefit, including strengthening the heart and lungs, improving attention span, reducing respiratory rates and increasing heart rate variability over the long term, managing anxiety, improving mental and physical performance, lowering body mass, healing disease and easing depression.
Many of these effects are related and causal. They all start with the fundamental effects of slow, mindful breathing through the nose: lowering stress, improving blood flow and slowing heart rate.
For those of us interested in optimal aging, extending life span and improving what life we have, the simple act of enhanced and proper breathing carries massive connotations.
Really? Just from breathing?
These are large claims, and more data is needed to make definitive claims about the physiological benefits of breathing practice, or breathwork, as it’s often called. It’s a fairly new focus of scientific study; Western science has only been focusing on breathing effects and benefits for a few decades.
A widely read book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by journalist James Nestor, has reignited a lot of attention on the importance of healthy breathing since its publication in 2020. Nestor goes into researched depth about the far-ranging positive effects of proper breathing, as well as the negative health consequences of improper breathing, such as habitual mouth breathing.
While the study of breathing is fairly new within Western science, breathwork as a discipline has been around for centuries, as Nestor documents. Our most ancient ancestors, whose faces, skulls and sinuses were better adapted for healthy breathing, likely slept more restfully, had lower general stress and disease, in part because of their open respiratory systems and blood vessels. (Of course, they dealt with numerous other challenges, and their lives were shorter on average than ours, for a number of other reasons than breathing). Over millennia, and in particular since the Industrial Revolution, our noses, sinuses and crania have shrunk, partly due to our softer, more processed diets. As a result of that and other factors, many of us today have adopted breathing habits less than optimal, said Nestor.
He also writes that, for some unknown reason, breathing as a healthy discipline and area of scientific study, had lost its luster in the 20th century and receded in importance. Today, thankfully, healthy breathing is making a strong comeback, not least here in the Pioneer Valley, where we have a range of breathwork practitioners to learn from. Any one of the thousands of yoga practitioners in the Valley has likely practiced breathing, typically incorporated into yoga instruction, where it’s called Pranayama.
For some practitioners and teachers of breathing, and many in the Valley who practice healthy breathing, none of the claims above come as a surprise. They know the brief, daily practice of breathing deeply and slowly, with attention on the breath, can bring about calm, perspective, feelings of peace and resilience, higher energy, better rest and sleep, and overall well-being.
What is optimal breathing?
It can mean a lot of things, and there are many different techniques on a spectrum of intensity. What mindful breathing boils down to is simple: It’s focusing on the breath and slowing breathing, usually by counting seconds during inhales and exhales, for several minutes each day.
It’s also, necessarily, about breathing through the nose. As Nestor points out, the nose contains filters, like cilia, and properties that help us process particles and elements in the air we take in, strengthening our immunity. Certain harmful bacteria, viruses and other materials can enter our system, if invited through the mouth, that would have been blocked in the nose. Also, our nose and sinus naturally produce nitric oxide, a beneficial gas that helps fight germs, promote blood flow and lower blood pressure throughout the body.
Over time, a mindful breather trains their body and mind to naturally breathe slower and more thoroughly, inhaling through the nose, fully expanding the lungs and pushing all the air out with the diaphragm.
Some people — who have been breathing just fine for many decades of life, thank you very much — might question some of these claims. Why should they take time to breathe differently when it’s something they’ve been doing since they inhaled their first lungful fresh out of their mother’s womb?
For the doubters, fortunately, experiencing the benefits of healthy breathing doesn’t require big investments of time or money. If you’re skeptical, you can just try it. Take five minutes, reread the first paragraph and practice breathing. Take notice of the effects on your body and mind during and afterward. It’s very likely you will feel more calm, even if only slightly, and less stressed. You might also feel increased energy to continue your day. If one practice session brings on benefits, make it a daily routine to increase and expand those benefits.
Many breathwork options
For those interested in digging in deeper, there are many options, locally and beyond, to study and practice breathing. There is also a huge range of methods and approaches to breathing. For example, there’s a popular technique called square breathing that first responders, Navy SEALs and firefighters often practice to maintain calm in dangerous situations. There are a number of controlled, slow-counting methods, some including brief periods of holding breath. There’s a technique that has swept across the world, originated by Dutchman Wim Hof, that puts students through a series of fast, mildly hyperventilative breaths to prepare for ice plunges, all to bring about powerful psychological effects.
Kate Stenson, director of Nirvana Yoga in Easthampton, has been teaching yoga since 2009. Like other yoga instructors, she incorporates breathing guidance into her classes as a way of controlling the breath, the “prana,” and the energy in the body. “By controlling the breath, you can control your energy, your mood, and your nervous system,” Stenson said.
Stenson guides her students through several different forms of breathing techniques as part of her range of yoga disciplines, such as square breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, 3-part breath, and something called the Bee’s Breath. “There are so many different ways to control your breathing to help you feel more mindful in the present moment,” she notes.
Stenson suggests that beginners of breathwork ease in with short, 1-2-minute intervals of controlled breathing. “Once you get the hang of it, you will find that you can practice mindful breathing anywhere at any time,” she said, “not just in a yoga class. For example, there are times when you might feel nervous before public speaking, a job interview, tough conversations, hosting an event, being in traffic, or feeling pain, etcetera. Take a moment to breathe and count your breath, like this: count to four on an inhale, then, as you exhale, count to six. (Exhalations are more calming than inhalations).”
Rise Harvey, a Valley resident, practices and is working toward certification to teach a specific form of breathwork called Holotropic Breathing (HB), an immersive experience that follows a specific set of techniques, he explains, under the guidance of a trained facilitator. HB can deliver powerful effects, Harvey said, as it did for him.
“It is rare that a participant emerges from their first holotropic experience without being profoundly affected,” Harvey said. “I witnessed a neurosurgeon who was, quite skeptically, exploring HB and expanded consciousness after being present for a patient’s near-death experience. He emerged amazed that his breath could take him on such a powerful journey. The effects are wide-ranging and can range from a sense of peace, a reprocessing of biographical history, including healing the effects of past trauma, and transpersonal experiences of flying, living other lives and more.”
From the very simple act of controlling a few breaths to very deep and immersive breathwork, the potential benefits of focused, intentional breathing can address a huge range of physical and psychological issues.
A simple act
As a longtime musician and meditator, and now as an aging adventurist, I have recognized the essentiality of mindful, deep breathing for as long as I can remember. At age 11, when I began studying the trumpet, I was taught to breathe and push out air using my diaphragm. Later, as a singer, I practiced diaphragmatic breathing as a way to deliver a more resonant, more projective vocal tone.
And during physically exerting adventures, like scuba diving, bicycling and mountain climbing, I have found that proper breathing — deep, slow as possible, and through the nose whenever possible — makes a massive difference in endurance, energy and peak performance.
As we age, breathing well becomes more important, to maintain healthy blood circulation, especially to the brain, but also to maintain a healthy heart rate and manage hypertension.
“As we age, our bodies may become less mobile,” explains Stenson, “but we always have our breath. Mindful breathing can lower stress, help you concentrate, improve sleep, and lower blood pressure.”
It’s one of the simplest, least demanding actions we can take, as we age and at any stage in life, to improve our health, longevity and quality of life.
Just breathe. Slowly. Mindfully. Calmly.
Eric Weld, a former Gazette reporter, is the founder of agingadventurist.com.