This article was previously published on June 29, 2020 and has been updated with new information.
Breathing is common, habitual, and nearly always automatic. When you’re stressed, your breathing patterns and rhythms change. This often leads to more chest breathing in response to a “fight or flight” situation, a response triggered by the autonomic nervous system.first
In April 2019, a headline in The New York Times announced, “Americans are among the most stressed people in the world…”2 This number comes less than a year before the COVID-19 pandemic raised stress levels even further.
Americans are no strangers to stress. A poll was conducted in 2007 by the American Psychological Association (APA). In a press release, they noted that a third said they were living with “extreme stress” and 48 percent said their stress had “increased over the past five years”.3 Russ Newman, APA executive director of professional practice, commented:4
“Stress in the US continues to escalate and is affecting every aspect of people’s lives – from work to personal relationships to their sleeping patterns and eating habits, as well as their health.
We know that stress is a fact of life and that some stress can have positive effects, however, the high levels of stress that many Americans report experiencing can have negative consequences. long-term health, from fatigue to obesity and heart disease. “
Fortunately, your breathing isn’t completely automatic. Controlled breathing is one of the strategies that have been shown to be effective in reducing physiological stress indicators and improving feelings of calm.
This means you can take control of your breathing to help manage stress, improve your ability to relax, and take bigger steps toward taking control of your health. Let’s start with a brief explanation of some of the different parts of the nervous system.
Functions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems
Stress and your body’s response to environmental stimuli that cause stress are survival mechanisms. However, chronic activation of the system causes a consistent release of hormones that produce harmful physiological changes.
While a fight-or-flight response is important if you’re facing a bear or fleeing an attacker, constant exposure to social stress can increase your risk of chronic disease. and death.5 Your response to a stressful situation begins in your brain’s amygdala, which plays a role in how you process emotions related to stress, joy, and other situations.6
The amygdala sends signals to the hypothalamus, which transmits signals to the body through the autonomic nervous system. This system controls functions in the body that happen automatically, such as your heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate.
The autonomic nervous system has two parts, one that raises the alarm and the other that calms you down. The sympathetic nervous system signals the fight-or-flight response to begin. This gives you the energy and focus you need to get out of a risky situation. Once the danger has passed, the parasympathetic nervous system will help brake the release of hormones to allow the body to rest.
Each of these changes happens on the fly and without any input from you. This is why you can jump out of the way of a snake in the grass before you fully realize there’s anything in your path.
Keeping the sympathetic nervous system active and ready will have an adverse effect on your health. By using controlled breathing, you can calm yourself and make real physiological changes, including:7
- Lower your heart rate and blood pressure
- Reduce stress hormone levels
- Balance the amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the blood
- Improves immune function and energy levels
- Increased sense of calm
Box breathing helps reduce stress and promote health
The box breathing technique is what the SEALS use. In this video, SEALFIT’s Mark Divine demonstrates his box breathing and tactical breathing skills. He explains that tactical breathing is used during the performance to ease your mind when you are mesmerized. For those of us who aren’t in combat situations, this could happen in a boardroom, during a sports competition, or while taking a test.
SEALS uses box breathing as a practice technique, so tactical breathing is effective when needed. There are four steps and each step is performed in the same amount of time. Breathing affects the way you think and feel.8 Lynne Everatt is an author, personal trainer, and wellness expert from Toronto. She spoke to a Forbes reporter, saying:9
“Stress and anxiety activate a neural circuitry designed to be used sparingly in response to life-or-death threats, not every day as a response to heavy traffic, a toxic or overworked boss.
Chronic stress has a corrosive effect on the brain that is associated with degeneration of the hippocampus (the memory center of the brain) and impaired function of the prefrontal cortex that can manifest in our lives as depression, dementia, and executive dysfunction. “
To start practicing box breathing, go to a quiet place where you can focus and maintain good posture. Ideally, you’ll want to measure how many cycles or minutes you can do this technique, and do it up to five minutes.ten
Take each of the steps below with focus and intention in your actions. Most people who use this technique recommend that you inhale and exhale counting to four or five. Both are acceptable as long as each period has the same duration.
Step 1 – Start by exhaling the air in the lungs on a slow count to four. Some recommend exhaling through your mouth; Divine recommends exhaling through your nose.
Step 2 – Hold your breath for a slow count of four.
Step 3 – Breathe in slowly, counting slowly to four times through your nose, keeping your back straight and breathing through your belly so your shoulders don’t rise.
Step 4 – Hold your breath for a slow count of four and return to step 1.
Breathing through the nose brings many advantages
Breathing through the nose offers specific health benefits. Researchers have found that people who often breathe through their mouths have a higher risk of sleep problems and attention deficit disorder.11 One hypothesis for this is differences in brain oxygenation.
People who breathe through their mouth tend to hyperventilate or get more oxygen than they need.twelfth This lowers CO2 levels in the body, which is important because you need a balance of oxygen and CO2 to function optimally. Breathing through the nose helps with this.
The vagus nerve is the main part of the parasympathetic nervous system.13 Diaphragmatic breathing, which you may have heard as slow abdominal breathing, activates the vagus nerve and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system. Since the 1970s, deep breathing has become a central part of stress and anxiety relief, widely accepted by Western clinicians.14
By stimulating the vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous system, breathing through the nose can help reduce stress, anxiety, and release stress hormones. Breathing through your nose helps you breathe easier.
This may sound like a bad recommendation, but many people regularly overbreath and deplete their carbon dioxide stores. Chronic mouth breathing has been linked to a number of health problems, including:
- Sleep apnea15
- Bronchospasm with exercise-induced asthma16,17
- Abnormal development of the face18,19
- Poor oral health20
- Hyperventilation, which leads to a decrease in the amount of oxygen reaching your brain and heart21,22
Other breathing techniques to improve health
As I previously wrote in “Top Breathing Techniques for Better Health,” the function behind box breathing helps reduce stress, increase your CO2 levels, and signal your parasympathetic system is breathing. by the diaphragm. You can easily assess your body’s CO2 tolerance at home, using a technique developed by Dr. Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko.23
This Russian doctor discovered that the level of CO2 in your lungs correlates with your ability to hold your breath after a normal exhalation. Start by sitting up straight with your feet flat on the floor. Inhale and exhale through the nose. After exhaling, pinch your nose to keep the air out and then start the stopwatch. Hold your breath until you feel the first desire to breathe. When you feel the urge, keep breathing and record the time.
Your first breath should be calm and controlled through your nose. If you feel like you have to take a deep breath, you’ve been holding your breath for too long. What you just measured is called a “control pause” or CP. This is a reflection of your body’s tolerance for carbon dioxide. Most people can hold it for 20 to 40 seconds, but 40 to 60 is optimal. Anything lower than 40 can be cause for concern.
One strategy to improve your CP is to raise your fitness and endurance levels. Another way is to improve your breathing technique by expanding your belly rather than raising your shoulders. When your shoulders rise during inhalation, it is called vertical breathing.
This can make you feel taller and it doesn’t involve enlarging your stomach. However, breathing properly causes your midsection to widen and is known as horizontal breathing. This helps your diaphragm work, allows you to breathe more fully, and stimulates the vagus nerve.
Nitric Oxide nasal spray may have antiviral properties
Another reason to breathe through the nose is to increase nitric oxide (NO) production.24 Your body also produces NO in other places, including your endothelial cells. This is a dissolved gas that has a number of unique health benefits, some of which I discussed in “Importance of healthy bacteria in nitric oxide production.”
Many of those benefits can result from NO being a signaling molecule. Doctors use this gas in a number of clinical settings, including to help reverse high blood pressure in the lungs in infants. NO produced by your endothelium helps to relax your arteries and lower blood pressure. This helps promote oxygenation to all your organs.25
Another benefit of inhaled nitric oxide is in treating viral infections. Clinical trials are currently underway to treat people infected with SARS-CoV-2. Key actions that can help fight COVID-19 include:26
- Dilates the pulmonary arteries to help the lungs receive more blood
- Open bronchial airways to increase oxygen transport
- Directly elicits antiviral activity against viruses
Louis J. Ignarro, PhD, author of the article in The Conversation, was one of three recipients of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. A team of pharmacologists discovered how nitric oxide is produced. and its function in the body.27 Nitric oxide is made in the nasal cavity, but not in the mouth.
This means that people who regularly breathe through their mouths are bypassing the production process that can be inhaled into the lungs.28 This direct delivery helps to increase air flow and blood flow in the lung tissue, and it inhibits the growth and replication of viruses and other microorganisms. There is currently a clinical trial to:29
“…Determine whether inhaled NO improves short-term respiratory status, prevents future hospitalizations, and improves clinical course in patients diagnosed with COVID-19 particularly in the emergency department. or not.”
You can help boost NO production at home with a simple, four-minute exercise, three times a day. Dr. Zach Bush, who holds a three-board certification that includes expertise in internal medicine, endocrinology, and metabolism, has named this exercise the Nitric Oxide Dump. He says it’s efficient anaerobically and the more you do it, the better it works.
The exercise can be done at home without equipment and can be suitable for all fitness levels. It works by stimulating the release of nitric oxide. You’ll learn more about the exercise, how to do it, and why it’s beneficial at “Physical Checkup: Why You Need to Try the Nitric Oxide Dump.”
