Breathing. We do it often and we tend to not think about it all that much. But what if you should be thinking about it? James Nestor and his breathing partner in crime Anders Olsson set out to find the answer. Plus they conveniently wrote a book about it.
While there has been ongoing study in the area of breathing and the neurological tethers to which it is tied, there is a much smaller volume of research surrounding how different types/forms of breathing impact our wellbeing. What Nestor argues, and what we should consider, is that breathing is the neglected, missing pillar in our society’s broader picture of health.
We may begin by asking how free divers traverse the ocean depths for many minutes on end and alpine climbers seem not to need much oxygen at extreme altitudes? While it may seem inextricably described as purely anomalous or magical, it really isn’t. There is real, concrete science behind it that we can learn from and apply to our everyday lives. Not only can the lessons of breathing allow us to go to extremes above and below sea level, it has the ability to help us live much longer, happier and healthier lives.
The first key takeaway is that nose breathing > mouth breathing. Or maybe nose breathing >>>>> mouth breathing. As Nestor points out, we are the ‘worst breathers in the animal kingdom’. Through evolution, our mouths have been getting smaller, leading to more breathing problems. Our modern diets have pushed us further from optimal as the tenderising and cooking of food eventually led to malocclusion and consequent airway obstruction. Anthropological research has shown that in just the last 300 years, our mouths have shrunk, faces grown flatter and sinuses plugged. The accentuation of a V-shaped palette over time has meant we spend more time breathing through our mouth. What they found was that mouth breathing was quite literally destroying our health.
Experiments show that in as little as 24 hours of pure mouth breathing, a spike in sleep apnea and snoring become evident. This means less oxygen to the brain and the body, bringing with it a whole onslaught of adverse effects. According to this research, mouth breathing is also the number one cause of cavities, beating out sugar to the title. That one was a bit shocking. It is attributed to the fact that dry mouth can change the acidity levels in your saliva and disturb the healthy pH balance in your mouth. Ultimately, this makes for a more corrosive environment that can facilitate tooth decay.
But don’t fear. There is hope. Breathing through your nose seems to be beneficial on many levels.
What researchers eventually managed to confirm was that not only are our noses lined in erectile tissue (yes, you read that right), our nasal erectile tissue mirrors various states of our health. It would become inflamed during sickness or other states of imbalance. Our right and left nasal cavities also worked like an HVAC system, controlling temperature and blood pressure and feeding the brain chemicals to alter our moods, emotions, and sleep states. The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you're inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This happens because breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic nervous system, the "fight or flight" mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness and readiness. Breathing through the right nostril will also feed more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain, specifically to the prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with logical decisions, language, and computing. Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect. It is the brake system to the right nostril's accelerator. The left nostril is more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety. Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the opposite side of the prefrontal cortex, to the area that influences creative thought and plays a role in the formation of mental abstractions and the production of negative emotions. What directs this rambling path are turbinates, six maze-like bones (three on each side) that begin at the opening of your nostrils and end just below your eyes. The lower turbinates at the opening of the nostrils are covered in that pulsing erectile tissue, itself covered in mucous membrane, a nappy sheen of cells that moistens and warms breath to your body temperature while simultaneously filtering out particles and pollutants. All these invaders could cause infection and irritation if they got into the lungs. It's constantly on the move, sweeping along at a rate of about half an inch every minute, more than 60 feet per day: Like a giant conveyor belt, it collects inhaled debris in the nose, then moves all the junk down the throat and into the stomach, where it's sterilised by stomach acid, delivered to the intestines, and excreted. This conveyor belt doesn't just move by itself. It's pushed along by millions of tiny, hair-like structures called cilia. In confluence, the different areas of the turbinates will heat, clean, slow and pressurise air so that the lungs can extract more oxygen with each breath. This is why nasal breathing is far more healthy and efficient than breathing through the mouth. In fact, nasal breathing can increase nitric oxide concentration by 6x, playing a key role in opening veins and capillaries for healthy circulation, consequently increasing oxygen levels by 18 percent.
Moreover, just as we become a society of over-eaters, we have become a society of over-breathers. Packman explained that over-breathing can have other, deeper effects on the body beyond just lung function and constricted airways. When we breathe too much, we expel too much carbon dioxide, and our blood pH rises to become more alkaline; when we breathe slower and hold in more carbon dioxide, pH lowers and blood becomes more acidic. Almost all cellular functions in the body take place at a blood pH of 7.4, our sweet spot between alkaline and acid. Simply breathing less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere.
Breathing practices that include breath-holding have shown immense benefit in dealing with anxieties and fear neuroses. Biologically, anxieties are an over sensitivity to perceived fear, and on a neuronal level, they were originally thought to be purely caused by over-reactive amygdalae. However, this may not be the case. What studies have shown is that the ‘fear’ of not taking another breath pervades even those without functional amygdalae, even when literally nothing else can scare them. The feeling of the ‘need to breathe’ comes from a cluster of neurons called the central chemoreceptors at base of brain stem. What is key to this is the fact that our brain determines this primitive sensation not by oxygen concentration, but CO2 concentration. What research has shown is that sometimes fears were not about psychological problems but had a physical manifestation as well — anxiety and panic may be best dealt with by conditioning chemoreceptors in our brain to become more flexible to CO2 levels through the art of breath holding. The breath-holding breathing techniques — which manifest themselves in various permutations — are what alpine climbers and free divers have used to train their chemoreceptors to withstand extreme fluctuations in CO2 levels. Through harnessing similar techniques, Wim Hoff — the breathing cult hero — has displayed his ability to control body temperature and immune response by inducing stress hormones such as adrenaline, cortisol and norepinephrine to kill pathogens, fight inflammation and flood the body with endogenous opioids and dopamine.
While there are many breathing exercises that can set you on the right path, here is one that is arguably the easiest and most effective. The widely used breathing technique has been practiced by Navy SEALs and many breath experts including Dr Jack Feldman — who happens to be the UCLA Professor of Neurobiology who discovered and named the Pre-Botzinger complex — the area in the brain stem responsible for controlling breathing. Essentially, to practice ‘box-breathing’, simply inhale through the nose for five seconds, hold for five seconds, exhale for five seconds, hold for five seconds, and repeat for as long as you wish. Studies have shown that as little as a few minutes a day can be enough to elicit positive results.
So maybe try to squeeze it in to the morning routine.
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