Conscious Breathing: Part One
Conscious Breathing: Part One
MIND Your Breathing
The core of the Check Engine Light philosophy as it were is to create an organized system that helps us to pay closer attention to indicators from the body and mind. By no means is that sentiment anywhere near novel or revolutionary. Systems like these have been part and parcel of human life for millennia. Indicators and tools that help us to continually recalibrate ourselves to most effectively and efficiently respond to the demands of life and environment are many. In my experience very few wield the power to leverage our own physiology for these purposes as effectively as the practice of conscious breathing.
Breathing is in a unique position to give us feedback about our state of being both physiologically and psychologically due to its core connection to the Autonomic Nervous System. Deeply braided to ancient portions of our nervous system as well as newer evolutionary brain circuits involved with conscious attention and control of the body, conscious breathing is a nearly ubiquitous connector of our physiology and is universally available to all human beings.
It's reliability as an internal polygraph of sorts can help us better attune ourselves to the reality of our own needs to maintain health and performance. Additionally, becoming skilled at conscious breathing puts us in a position to more effectively respond to the changing demands of body and mind in real time as the nature of those needs shifts according how the demands of life and our own internal state relate to each other.
This article will serve as the first in a series of articles to provide an introduction to understanding the nuts and bolts of using conscious breathing to support performance longevity. While over the course of this series we will discuss some anatomy and physiology I will strive to keep it to the absolutely minimum necessary dosage and focus on the invariant features of conscious breathing application. Far too often these discussions get bogged down in both the ancient and modern jargon and the point gets lost in the sauce.
Breathing In General
This might be a weird way to start a breathing article that is going to tell you to breathe more consciously but here it is - You don't have to do this to be healthy. Ever. There are all manner of respiratory zealots out there who will have you think breathing is the end all be all of everything, everywhere, all the time. It's not. In fact, nothing is. We are wonderfully complex adaptive biological organisms. There is no one ring to rule them all. Many factors in both the categories of Nature and Nurture work to produce the synergy that is you.
However - learning to pay attention to regulate your breathing at will can have a aggregate cascade effect on health and performance that is in my experience difficult to overstate. The power of this effect is not from deep magic in the mythologic or fantastical sense but the net effect is seemingly magic due to the physiologically ubiquitous nature of breathing. It is literally and figuratively at the core of our being.
Breathing is entangled in every layer of our existence from our psycho-emotional state to how efficiently we manage the chemistry of producing energy and discarding waste. Becoming conscious of our breathing every moment is not necessary and may even be counterproductive. However, learning how to attune ourselves to the message coming from our breathing and how to take control long enough to fine tune our response mechanisms in ways that more succinctly serve our interests is a fine reason to make even a small investment in this practice.
Long term and deep investment, in my experience and observation have tremendous potential to compound the interest of health and performance while mitigating costs of stress produced by life. No only that but commitment to conscious breathing opens up a world of awareness that modern science is just beginning to take note of even though ancient practices have encouraged it for millennia.
The rest of this article and Part Two to follow will be organized by the categories used in the Check Engine Light curriculum. These three MIND, MVMT, and MTTR by no means encapsulate the larger reality of human performance longevity but are useful places to start practically and also serve to provide consistency in this publication.
*To dive deeper on those categories click on the hyperlinks above to be directed to articles relevant to each.
MIND
Just as a brief prelude - for our purposes MIND refers to layers of the nervous system - the Autonomic, the Emotional (Limbic), and the Cognitive (Cortical). The way these areas interact to produce our stress response, whether adaptive or maladaptive, will be the areas of focus. Breath control offers a way unify our attention and purposefully direct the normally subconscious reactive mechanisms in these systems. Let's very briefly cover the basics of both the auto-pilot and manual options available in breathing.
Auto-Pilot
The Autonomic Nervous System is the foundation of our physiology. Inherited from our primordial ancestors the Autonomic Nervous System or ANS functions as the primary life giving chemistry of the human body to include behaviors like heart beat, blood pressure, digestion, and of course breathing. These mechanisms organize themselves in open feedback loops that shift and change constantly to the demands of the body and its need to respond to the environment. The ANS is divided into two subsystems, the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems (SNS and PNS respectively). Both systems effect the fundamental ANS physiologies but in opposing directions. The SNS, often referred to as the Fight or Flight mechanism (but also includes Freeze and Fornicate) is the driver of increased stimulation and arousal. When triggered the SNS causes increases in heart rate and blood pressure by way of examples. The SNS can be thought of simply as the gas pedal. The PNS, often referred to as the Rest and Digest mechanism, moves these same physiologies in the direction of decreased arousal and stimulation. For example, a decrease in the previously mentioned heart rate and blood pressure. An easy summary of the PNS is the brake pedal. So we have gas to go, and brakes to slow down. Under normal conditions your body transitions between varying degrees of both just as driving well means effective transitioning between gas and brakes. This allows us too adapt to the energy demands of our environment to improve our chances at biological survival.
Not only do the ANS function on these feedback loops it learns. Not in the sense that we normally think of in terms like sitting in a classroom. Instead the ANS and furthermore the interactions it has with other parts of the brain such as the hypothalamus create reinforcing feedback loops where perception informs physiology and physiology informs perception. An easy example of this is fear. Fear is an emotion designed to protect us. Not only in response to inherently dangerous situations but to help us remember when these situations occur and avoid them. Walking up to the edge of a cliff and feeling fear will present itself not just as an abstract internal sense but through the embodied sensation of an increase in heart rate, a change in breathing, rise in blood pressure, and muscular tension to name a few. This cascade of responses will make it so you can mobilize the appropriate response and in effect, not die.
Your body works to avoid these scenarios and so works in ways that alert and mobilize learned responses to this context again but hopefully sooner. So if you walked past a dead tree before you almost fell off the cliff the next time you walk past the dead tree you may have a response both in emotion (fear) as well as the in autonomic physiology. If you slipped near the edge and almost died your nervous might even take it a step further and react whenever you see ANY dead tree. Maybe you don't go full fight or flight but maybe when you see a dead tree for the rest of your life you get a little tighter and have a slight uptick in heart rate. You might even hold your breath for a second. If the experience was intense enough you could even have changes in physiology as a result of remembering the event. In other words the Sympathetic, activating, side of the Autonomic can get fired off by layers of physiology and psychology all which are mutually reinforcing. Furthermore, this process is occurring without any conscious awareness on our part. Usually, that decentralized training of the Sympathetic (Gas Pedal) and Parasympathetic (Brake Pedal) is a benefit to us.
Sometimes though, the pedals can get stuck. In these cases circuitry gets stuck firing in ways that may have served us in the short term but don't necessarily help us stay adaptable into the future. When the sympathetic pedal in particular gets stuck whether through purposeful training or by virtue of environment or experience, costs can add up. While the illustration above is probably a bit overly simplistic it does illustrate both the reactive and the predictive nature of the ANS and its interweaving with the other aspects of MIND to help us effectively generate adaptive solutions to problems we encounter, especially ones that can hurt us. This is true both in terms of physical (real or perceived) and pscyho-emotional harm. Again most of the time the Auto-Pilot function gets it right. However, there are cases where we can grab the yoke so that we can more efficiently and effectively direct these systems for our own benefit.
Grabbing the Yoke
Under most conditions the Autonomic Nervous System and as a consequence, your breathing, are remarkably self-regulating and truth be told, rarely to never require top down interference in the strictest sense of the idea. However, taking the craft off of auto-pilot can allow for opportunities to recalibrate ourselves in order to be more effective in the world. As evidence for the benefit of doing so, I offer the anatomical reality of direct nerve pathways from parts of the brain that control conscious muscle movement to the diaphragm and intercostals.
Why would nature grant us this power over this incredibly complex mechanism? To consciously alter our response to stress. Sophisticated parts of the forebrain allow us to become highly aware of and modulate our response to stress both in real-time (right now) and over time (into the future). Bootstrapped to that biological technology is the ability to grab the yoke of our own breathing and in doing so, change the relationship between the gas pedal and the brakes if we deem it necessary. Let's look at some practical ways this happens and how you can use simple tools to move the needle in the direction you want to.
Real Time
Real time refers to acute conditions of stress. This could be lowering your heart rate during sports performance, feeling anxious just before an important presentation at work, or feeling nervous at the doctor's office. Any of these move the needle towards the gas pedal. That's not necessarily wrong in and of itself but if you determine that the engine is running too far in the red, breathing on purpose can be helpful and definitely won't hurt.
That's actually the first part of developing the skill of conscious breathing. To simply breathe on purpose. There is good research that shows the very act of switching your attention to your breathing shifts gears in the brain and body in ways that reduce stress perception (and therefore the actual effect of stress in that moment) and bring the locus of control back to you. One of the things clients struggling with anxiety have reported to me is that regardless of which breathing technique they used they felt more in control of how they were feeling. That is no small thing in moments of stress.
Next and more specifically, under conditions of right now stress time can be in short supply. In moments like these where the demands of the environment need a lot of your attention, breathing in specific numbered cadences can be difficult (if not impossible) and counterproductive. In those cases there is a simple mantra that will work well and give you room to adjust as you need to based on the particular situation. That is: control and slow the exhale. In that order.
First, focused exhalation is well established to engage the parasympathetic response by way of something called the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) of the heart (see this VIDEO for explanation). This exhalation can be powerful like blowing out a stubborn candle or pulsing like cleaning out a cut with peroxide. However you do it, you have to commit to the mechanics in order to get the effects of the RSA. Blowing out air like you're drying your new manicure won't do it. If time and situation allow progressively slowing the exhale down will help continue the shift from gas to brakes. If not short bursts of exhalation may help keep the engine from blowing up until more time to recover from the situation is available.
Over Time
Over time strategies are about encouraging the nervous system to pump the brakes over time. These strategies are used long term to recalibrate the ANS and provide specific "training times" for parasympathetic inputs in general. In other words if you just want be better at chill mode you have to teach your nervous system how to do it. This is especially true for people who have a history in high stress environments. That can mean a career like the military, first responder, or medical but it can also refer to people that have experience trauma or tend to struggle with feeling anxiety.
Interestingly, over time strategies don't differ fundamentally too much from real time. Step one is to breathe on purpose. Step two is to breathe slowly, especially the exhale. As a general rule when you're trying to encourage the ANS to pump the brakes the exhale should be longer than the inhale in the breath cycle. (Note: some breathing patterns like box breathing which is equal inhales, holds, and exhales help people too. If that's you, great!) Step three is to repeat cycles of slow, controlled breathing repeatedly over a given period of time. Usually somewhere between five and twenty minutes.
Now that we have the basics ideas established, let's get specific. One breathing pattern that has a preponderance of evidence is 6 breaths per minute or 1 breath per 10 seconds. This pace has been widely shown to engage the parasympathetic response for many people through the measurement of improved heart rate variability. Two versions of this pattern are a four second inhale and a six second exhale written as 4:6; and a three second inhale, two second hold, followed by a five second exhale written as 3:2:5. Both of these breathing patterns add up to 1 breath per 10 seconds. The minimum recommended time is five minutes. You can do it as long as twenty if your life and and level of commitment allow for it.
This breathing pattern, referred to as resonant breathing can be applied in a variety of circumstances. First thing in the morning before your day gets started. During a break in the middle of the day. Before bed to help you settle down and improve rest. Even if you wake in the middle of the night and have trouble resuming sleep. Any and all of these are opportunities to train your Autonomic Nervous System to hit the brake pedal. When you first try this out I recommend the minimum effective dose. Using metrics like heart rate variability or resting heart rate to measure the effect can be helpful but also stay aware of your own subjective sense of relaxation.Â
Get Started
There are certainly other breathing patterns out there and breathing nerds will argue about which one is the best. That's silly. Try them for yourself and then use the one that has a positive measurable effect for you. The breathing patterns I've mentioned in this short article are two easy ways to start experimenting with what works for you. If you use these and they work for you forever, great. If you need to try something different to get a new and improved effect, bully for you too. Don't get stuck in a method, focus on the effect.Â
In Part Two of this series we'll look at the other two categories of MVMT and MTTR. We'll discuss how breathing can improve your movement and potentially reduce pain and ways to use breathing to improve your aerobic health. I might even give you some cheat codes for immortality-but I wouldn't hold your breath.
Thanks for reading,
Rob
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