“Mind is the king of the senses; breath is the king of the mind; and the nerves are the king of the breath.”
—Iyengar
The typical adult human takes anywhere from 14,000 to 20,000 breaths a day. But be honest now: When was the last time you thought about even one of these? As breathing is so elemental and could be considered an autonomous action (the body just takes care of it because if you don’t breathe, you can’t live), we usually don’t give it a second thought. And most of the time not even a first one.
That is until we have to. Have you ever been out for a run or done an intense new workout and been left gasping for breath? Do you or does someone you know struggle with asthma that sometimes makes the breath forced or wheezy? Have you ever taken a trip to Colorado or another high-altitude part of the planet and felt like you were sucking air through a straw as you struggled up the side of a mountain?
While such situations are acute and typically rare, they do serve as reminders about the precious nature of breath. Once the overexertion, asthma attack, or lack of altitude acclimation passes, we go right back to forgetting about our breathing. In doing so, we’re missing out on an opportunity to regulate our physical, cognitive, and emotional state, while improving sleep, busting stress, and quelling anxiety (no pills required). Let’s look at how you can start becoming more aware of your breath so you can manipulate it like a sound engineer at a studio mixing desk to feel and perform the way you want to in any situation. We’ll also explore how regulating your breath will benefit your posture and help keep you stable during exercise, even when you start to fatigue.
In our always-on, constantly connected, overstimulated world, it’s all too easy to get stuck in a state of perma-stress in which it’s impossible to truly achieve relaxation. And many of the activities we believe are helping us calm down—cruising our social feeds, watching TV, and so on—are actually revving us up. That’s one of the reasons so many people turn to pills or alcohol in the evening: an effort to unwind. Apparently it’s not working, at least if sleep researchers are to be trusted. The National Institutes of Health believe that between 50 and 70 million American adults are wandering around like characters from The Walking Dead because they get inadequate sleep.1 And a big reason is that people cannot get out of their all-go, all-the-time mind-set.
The quickest, easiest, and most effective way to alter a physical, cognitive, or emotional state is with breathing. You can think of breath as a remote control for your nervous system. So at night if you’re stressed or anxious (and let’s face it, these days who isn’t?), you can breathe your way into a parasympathetic recovery state using nothing more than the most elemental thing you do: focused nasal breathing. Doing so will enable you to turn down the volume in your amygdala and other regions of the brain responsible for kicking you into a watchful, tense state of high alert.
While most of us could do with taking a chill pill more often, there are certain people who don’t just find it difficult to relax, but impossible. These include those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A recent study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds concluded that soldiers who performed yogic breathing (aka breaths taken through the nose and initiated in the diaphragm—so called “belly breathing”) reported lower anxiety and fewer PTSD symptoms.2 So even if you’ve tried everything to help you recover from a traumatizing event like a car wreck and nothing has worked, give breath work a shot.
If you’re having trouble winding down at night, try this protocol from my good friend and co-founder of the Art of Breath, Brian Mackenzie. Lie down flat on your couch, bed, or floor and spend at least five minutes breathing in through your nose for five seconds, holding your breath for fifteen seconds, and then exhaling through your nose for ten seconds. If you find yourself in a stressful situation during the day, you can utilize the same protocol, or simply focus on slow nasal inhalations and even slower nasal exhalations for a couple of minutes.
“If you know the art of breathing you have the strength, wisdom, and courage of ten tigers.”
—Chinese proverb
When I was researching this chapter, I came across a picture of the Australian national rugby team training. I saw the players were all wearing something over their mouths. Wondering what the heck they were up to, I read the accompanying story and learned that they were participating in a breath-retraining program that used such tape to encourage nasal-only breathing.
In a past Align Podcast episode, Buteyko breathing method expert Dr. Patrick McKeown, author of The Oxygen Advantage, pointed out that in sports (and life, for that matter), athletes often start mouth breathing way before they redline, or do so from the outset. The problem with this is that it signals to the brain that the body should be in a sympathetic fight-or-flight state. This is fine for short events like a 100-meter sprint or long jump or if you have to flee from a lion, but it isn’t sustainable for any length of time.
A major disadvantage of breathing through the mouth during physical exercise is that it is inefficient for a number of reasons. Mouth breathing deemphasizes our diaphragm, which is meant to draw air in and out of our lungs, and instead puts the emphasis on other muscles in the chest, neck, and back that aren’t qualified for the job. Once these begin to fatigue from all our huffing and puffing, they start sending signals to the nervous system that we’re getting worn out and need to slow down or stop. So we do, often much earlier than is necessary.
As humans we spend a large amount of our time upright, sitting, walking, standing, or running. Because of this, the greatest concentration of blood resides in the lower lobes of the lungs. Breathing through the mouth ventilates the upper lobes, and this is especially likely to occur during physical exercise. Mouth breathing with consequent upper-chest breathing is sabotaging our ability to adequately transfer oxygen from the lungs to the blood.
Breathing through the nose adds a resistance to respiration that is two to three times that of the mouth. When we slow down breathing, the breathing rate reduces, and the size of each breath increases. This significantly improves respiratory efficiency as less air is wasted to dead space. In simple terms, of every breath drawn into the body 150 ml of that air doesn’t reach the small air sacs in the lungs where oxygen transfer can take place. Instead, this 150 ml of air remains in the nasal cavity, throat, trachea, bronchi, and bronchioles. If one is breathing fast and shallow, a disproportionately large volume of air remains in dead space.
For example, during exercise, if 20 breaths are drawn into the body over one minute and each breath is 500 ml, this equates to a minute volume of 10 liters. Subtracting 150 ml from each breath shows that 7 liters of air actually reach the lungs for gas exchange to take place. When we slow breathing down to 10 breaths per minute, and increase the size of each breath to 1 liter, the amount of air that actually reaches the lungs is 8.5 liters. In this example, the amount of air drawn into the body is the same, but the amount of air reaching the small air sacs in the lungs increases when breathing is slow and deep. This translates into a 20 percent improved breathing efficiency simply by slowing the respiratory rate. Nasal breathing forces us to do this; otherwise, the feeling of air hunger is too intense when one breathes fast and shallow. By taping the mouth, we’re forced to inhale and exhale only through the nose, which prevents this premature fatigue, increasing endurance and sustained power output. And this isn’t just applicable to those big, burly Aussie rugby players. You and I can do it to improve our performance, too.
Not ready to bust out the LipSeal Tape (the brand McKeown recommends) or a cheaper alternative like NexCare Sensitive Skin Tape just yet? Then try this handy tip from Brian Mackenzie: Breathe only through your nose during your workouts. Sounds simple enough, right? Sure, until you hop on your rowing machine and try to bust out a few fast intervals and feel like you’re going to pass out.
Don’t do that! Instead, back off the intensity a bit until you feel like you can maintain the cadence while still breathing nasally. After a few weeks, your body will get wise and you’ll be able to start going faster and harder for longer, while still breathing in and out through your nose. Mackenzie recommends using nasal only in your training for three to four weeks to start. After that, you’ll be ready to begin incorporating mouth breathing during maximal efforts as a final “gear,” as the Art of Breath co-founder Rob Wilson refers to it.
“When life is foggy, path is unclear and mind is dull, remember your breath. It has the power to give you the peace.”
—Amit Ray
Another context for utilizing mouth taping that might be even more impactful is at bedtime. Even if you commit to only nasal breathing during the day—and, as we just suggested, during all but the most intense of workouts—you might still be mouth breathing at night. Doing so can undo much of your good work during waking hours, reduce both the quantity and quality of your slumber, and leave you feeling groggy and ill-rested in the morning. It can also put you back in a sympathetic state that messes with your neural and cardiovascular systems. So if you’re using a sleep and/or heart rate variability monitor or app and are getting crappy numbers, that’s probably why.
Regularly performing some daytime exercises to increase your carbon dioxide tolerance—which is actually what prompts us to take the next breath, not oxygen deprivation—is one way to sort out your nighttime breathing. Exercises like those McKeown shares in The Oxygen Advantage can also help you stop over-breathing—that is to say taking unnecessarily deep breaths too frequently. One way to test your carbon dioxide tolerance is to take a BOLT (body oxygen level test) score assessment, which you can determine simply:
1. Take a regular inhale and exhale through your nose.
2. Then, time how long you can hold your breath until you need to breathe (your breath when you resume breathing should be similar to how you were breathing before the breath hold).
While this isn’t a college entry test like the ACT or SAT, the results are no less important. Scoring less than twenty-five seconds means you are likely to have sub-optimal breathing patterns. These might all be contributing factors to an excessive feeling of breathlessness during physical exercise, congested nose, exercise-induced asthma, increased stress levels, anxiety, panic disorder, premature muscle fatigue, and, in keeping with the theme of this subsection, sleeping well. If you tally twenty-five to forty seconds, you have a decent tolerance to CO2 but may well be undermining this by mouth breathing during the day or at night, or by “over-breathing”—i.e., taking bigger breaths than you need. If you have sub-optimal breathing during the day, you also have sub-optimal breathing during sleep and physical exercise.
So even if you scored higher, you can still benefit from nasally breathing and making each breath a bit more nonchalant and fairly light. Studies show that reducing your breathing rate to between five and six breaths a minute—fewer than the average of ten to fourteen that “stress breathers” typically take—can significantly improve heart rate variability (HRV), which is one indicator that the parasympathetic “rest-and-digest” branch of the autonomic nervous system is in balance with the sympathetic “fight-or-flight” one.3 This is essential if you’re going to get high-quality, restorative sleep. The sweet spot appears to be five to seven breaths.
Chronic mouth breathing day after day doesn’t just increase stress and anxiety. It can also take a toll on a structural level. In the book Jaws (nope, it’s not about sharks), Sandra Kahn and Paul R. Erlich reveal that children who mouth breathe consistently end up with dental deformities and changes in jaw shape. They assert that if kids would nose breathe instead, we wouldn’t need a lot of the expensive orthodontics that parents have to shell out for.4
How could this be? you may ask. Try breathing from your mouth for a moment and notice the placement of your tongue. Now close your mouth and take a few breaths through the nose. Notice anything different? When you breathe through your nose, your tongue typically rests on the roof of your mouth, acting like a retainer to prevent your teeth from crowding, and your jaw comes forward instead of collapsing back toward your neck (i.e., the dreaded double chin).
Closing your mouth day and night can not only help prevent snoring and help avoid waking up with a dry mouth, but also can boost sleep quality, prevent the body from entering a sympathetic stress state, and literally change the shape of your face! One remedy: Try the method practiced by the Australian rugby team, but in the evening.
Place a task-specific, cut-to-size product like LipSeal Tape or a piece of sensitive tape from a roll (3M, Nexcare, etc.) lengthwise across your lips before bed. Do it twenty to thirty minutes before bed so you can get used to the sensation before attempting to fall asleep. Have a second strip ready by your bedside in case you wake up to use the bathroom and find the first one has fallen off. To further improve your nighttime breathing, you could consider a nasal dilator like Mute or AirMax. Relationship bonus: It might keep you in the good graces of your significant other by stopping your incessant snoring!
Disclaimer: This is another technique I don’t expect everyone to try, nor do I think everyone needs it, but I’ve heard too many success stories not to mention it as an option to improve sleep quality. Talk with your doctor before trying this if you suffer from any medical issues or experience obstructed breathing of any sort.
One of the first indicators that we’re pushing beyond our limits is we begin either holding our breath or stress-breathing through the mouth. Pay attention when you’re trying out a new yoga pose, going for a new personal record in the squat, or trying to keep up with a running partner who’s much faster—you’ll likely catch yourself mouth breathing around the same time that you start to realize that you’re focusing on the result more than you are the process itself. In his excellent book Endure, Alex Hutchinson highlights a similar issue in endurance athletes. When their breathing becomes ragged and labored, the respiratory muscles start to seize up, signaling to the brain that they’re fatigued. This causes what South African physiologist Tim Noakes calls the “central governor” to spring into action, leading to reduced force production and speed. Eventually the body will just be stopped from moving to protect itself.5
A third breath-related problem that athletes often encounter is a lack of stability in their trunk. Inefficient breathing can result in excessive breathing rate and volume, and when breathing is reaching its limit, respiration wins over stability of the spine. Breathing trumps what the body considers less important functions. When we mouth breathe, we minimize the role of the diaphragm. This structure doesn’t exist in isolation, but is connected to the rib cage, lumbar spine (not to mention the state of your autonomic nervous system), and some of the primary stabilizing muscles like the psoas. So if the diaphragm is compromised, so too are the parts of the torso that it’s connected to. If you’re doing a dead lift or squat, or just moving your couch over a couple feet and are breathing fast and shallow through your mouth, you’re likely to become unstable and start rounding your back. In contrast, taking a deep nasal breath increases intrathoracic pressure, allowing you to brace against a load (think about picking up a heavy box or deadlifting—there are plenty of scenarios in the gym and real life when you need to stay strong and cohesive through your trunk). The diaphragm moves downwards during inhalation, with the chest cavity acting as a balloon to help provide support and stability for the spine and pelvis. Having functional breathing while lifting helps generate optimal intra-abdominal pressure to reduce the risk of undue spinal compression.6
Once again, mouth breathing does have its place, such as when you’re in fifth gear (max cardiovascular effort) as discussed previously, or if you need to sip in air quickly for extra intra-abdominal pressure. A lack of movement competence—indicated by uncontrolled breath holding and gasping or collapsing in the torso—can create issues, especially if you’re an athlete. By correcting your breathing, you’re developing an invaluable tool applicable to any sport, greatly decreasing your risk of injury, and increasing your endurance in every aspect of your life.
Luckily, there’s a simple way to fix each of the breath-related movement problems we just explored. First, go back to basics with each of the movements you typically perform in the gym and in your sport. Remove weight, reduce speed, and tune into your breathing. If you notice you’re holding your breath or mouth breathing, relax and think consciously about nonchalant nasal breathing. This will likely give you greater movement capacity in the position because you will be signaling to your nervous system that you’re not under threat and can relax. When you reach a higher level of exertion at which this becomes impossible, still try to keep a certain pattern for your inhales and exhales, rather than letting your breath get away from you.
When you’re about to lift something heavy—be it a bar in the gym or one end of a couch that you’re helping a buddy move—stabilize your torso by taking a deep nasal breath and bracing your abs before you commence the lift. This creates what’s referred to as intrathoracic pressure, which is a ritzy way of saying that you’re keeping your trunk organized because of greater pressure in your chest cavity. Then slowly exhale on the way up.
There are some situations where you may be looking for a boost instead of all this slow, calm nasal breathing stuff. Your internal physiology has gears as we mentioned previously and it’s possible to simulate opening your engine up even if you’re not racing to the top of a mountain. So what do we do if we’re feeling low on energy and can’t seem to get ourselves into gear, particularly if catching a nap is off the table? Drinking enough coffee to kill a small horse is probably your go-to choice, but that’s going to make you feel jittery or sick to your stomach. And if you keep riding the caffeine train all day, it’ll further screw up your sleep, perpetuating the vicious cycle many of us know entirely too well.
So if not that, then what? Well, you could try breathing differently. I know this might sound nuts, but bear with me. Just as certain kinds of breathing can help you downshift (nasal, slow exhalations, low rate), so too can other sorts (nasal or mouth, fast exhalations, high rate) put you into fifth gear. That’s the beauty of breath control—once you have the basics down, you can work backward from your intended outcome to find the pattern, cadence, and kind of breathing you need to either elevate or down-regulate yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally. When you could use a system reset or an extra boost of energy to crush the day, it may be time to temporarily abandon the nasal-only plan, which applies to most situations, and add in some strong mouth breathing, telling your central computer to get up and at ’em.
To introduce a pattern interrupt to your nervous system and add some zeal to your day, we’re taking a cue from my friend and extreme athlete Wim Hof. Start with thirty “power” breaths with the following pattern: deep inhale, fast half-exhale (from either nose or mouth). Then hold your breath for as long as you safely can. Next, take a long inhale, and hold your breath for another ten to fifteen seconds. Slowly exhale and repeat two to three times. Not feeling the desired benefits? Then increase the depth and frequency of your breathing, and either repeat the thirty-breath cycle with the hold on the end or switch to deep inhalations through the mouth and exhalations in which you allow the air to come out naturally without pushing.
Wim’s approach is much more than simply huffing and puffing; it involves three pillars: gradual cold exposure, breathing techniques, and mind-set. The combination of these principles has been shown to not only influence the autonomic nervous system but reduce inflammation and boost immunity! (Learn more about Wim at Wimhofmethod.com or episode 204 of the Align Podcast.)
For the next thirty days, pay attention to your breath and do your best to make it exclusively come through your nose (unless you’re intentionally performing a breath practice that involves mouth breathing). It’s OK if you forget sometimes; just gently come back to the nose breathing, and take it easy on yourself.
If you’re ever feeling a little congested during your thirty days, try this nose breathing exercise to help clear your nasal passages:
1. Exhale normally through your nose.
2. Pinch your nose with your fingers to hold your breath.
3. While holding your breath, walk at a normal pace until you feel a strong urge to breathe.
4. Breathe in through your nose and calm your breathing as soon as possible.
5. Repeat five times.