How Breathing Can Change Your Life

Clickbait title, I know. But honestly, how many people have actually taken the time to study how they breathe? I’ll go ahead and be the first to admit it. I’ve been carelessly breathing my whole life without giving it too much thought. Sure I notice my breathing from time to time. I’ll take a minute or two here and there to take some relaxing deep breaths. After a run or heavy workout I can also feel my breathing as elevated, and I’ll take some time here to bring this back to a calm resting state after. But truthfully I’ve never taken more than maybe a 30 minute meditation to actually focus in on my breath for an extended period. Of course I always feel fantastic after this short period of focus on breath. Unfortunately this only lasts a few minutes before I revert back to my typical shallow mouth breathing, and then we’re back to square one. If only I’d known how much breath affects my daily living, maybe I’d have given this more thought a long time ago. Still, here I am. Better late than never.

This whole prompt was brought on by a culmination of a few things. First, my health and breathing has continued to drastically improve since quitting vaping and all nicotine. It’s a truly liberating feeling knowing I’m finally free from the claws of those stupid pens. One of the most helpful bits of information I learned while quitting is exactly how vaping affects the brain and our body. In very basic terms, it puts our body in a cycle of releasing a large dose of dopamine after a hit that will often relieve any perceived stress. The dopamine will then slowly dissipate within an hour or so (sometimes quicker) to finally leave us with the original feeling of stress, and the cycle repeats. This hits of dopamine of course feel great and work in the short term, but they don’t do anything to address the underlying issues. It’s like taking pain pills to help with a broken bone. Sure it helps you feel better in the short term, but without a cast or proper care it’ll never heal properly. The same applies for vaping, and much of life to be honest. I needed to find a real solution to handle my perceived stress, not a temporary and unhealthy fix. And that’s exactly what I did. Instead of using the vape as a crutch, I forced myself to sit with my stress and get to the bottom of what was making me stressed. In almost all cases, by the time I realized my issue, the problem had either passed or I’d realize just how foolish it was in the first place. This has helped immensely in handling my stress while getting over vaping, and I’m not sure I would be as healthy now without applying this knowledge.

This coincides with my massage therapy training, which places a heavy emphasis on breathing deeply. I noticed early on that my shallow breathing was factoring into my massage technique, making it feel shaky and unsure. In order to correct this, I had to make certain I was breathing deeply and properly during the entirety of the massage. While this should be simple enough, I often had trouble focusing on my breath for more than a few minutes and I’d go right back to shallow breathing. No matter what I’ve done, it still seems that the best I can do is to force a few good minutes of deep breaths before losing that focus. It’s infuriating to not be able to hold that concentration, but I’ve also learned that anything worth having will not come easy. This will take time, dedication and many, many hours of practice.

The final piece to this puzzle is my newfound appreciation for meditation. For some reason I always used to associate meditation with buddhism or some deeply spiritual practice, which I always felt uneasy about. It felt like I was treading on some ancient culture that I had no connection to and was forcing upon myself. It never felt right or comfortable, especially since every experience I had with meditation was in an extremely formal and spiritual setting. It’s challenging to relax enough here to be able to find any meaning in your breathing, which again caused me to leave the practice. This all takes me back to my first meditation, which happened at the old buddhist temple in Toledo. My sister had been interested in checking the temple out and asked me to come along. I happily joined her since I was already interested in new religions, and buddhism was at the top of that list. We showed up and were welcomed with open arms. They gave us a spot to sit and then left us to soak in the ceremony for the day. In retrospect it was all fairly laid back, but given that it was a structured meditation with chants or silence it somehow felt formal at the same time. During a period of silence, my poor sister had a very unfortunately timed gaseous eruption from her lower end, not nearly as quiet as I’m sure she hoped. It was at this time we both looked at each other. I sensed the panic she was feeling, and in unison we both got up and left immediately without another word. In hindsight this is much funnier than it is traumatizing, but perhaps explains why I never took meditation seriously. I would connect the practice to this memory, which reminded me how goofy the whole practice felt. It never clicked for me that there could be something deeper here than just a spiritual connection to a religious practice.

So with this mental block out of the way, I’d now realized just how simple meditation can be. It’s not about going to a temple, sitting perfectly still and smelling incense for an hour. This can help, but the idea is to be present with your breath. This means taking a mindful approach to how you inhale and exhale, and taking time to make sure each breath is executed properly. Easy enough in concept, very challenging to do continuously in practice. This is how I first discovered just how far off I am when breathing regularly. By taking time to carefully focus on each inhale and exhale, exactly 10 seconds in through the nose and 10 seconds out through the mouth, I realized how shallow my usual breathing is. Upon realizing this, I made a mental note to practice perfect breathing as often as I can, which then led me to studying breathing in the first place. I’m no expert, but after a few hours of casual online learning I feel I have a basic grasp. First, breathing in through the nose rather than the mouth is vastly superior. The best visual I was given is that nasal breathing is like drinking pure, clean water while breathing through the mouth is like drinking dirty pond water. Not entirely bad in a pinch, but doing this over a long time can be pretty nasty. Mouth breathing can lead to significant health issues, many of which have been proven to be resolved through nasal breathing. This makes perfect sense too if you think about it. The nose is specifically designed to help filter pathogens in the air when breathing, and bypasses many of the problem areas in the throat associated with mouth breathing. This allows these areas time to heal while reducing the bacterial exposure, resulting in better breath and better smelling breath. Another tip is making a conscious practice of breathing deeply as often as possible. It’s unreasonable to ask myself to breathe perfectly all day every day right away, because this simply isn’t how my body is wired yet. But I can start to train this into my daily routine, and in time this will start to feel more and more natural to do on a regulars basis without reminders. For now, this means that I try to be as mindful of my breath as often as possible, and at every occasion try to force myself to focus on perfect breaths for as long as I can. I’ve heard that breathing techniques like square breathing can help. This takes some practice for sure, but in time I should build up a habit of catching myself breathing poorly and correct this without too much intervention.

The final bit of advice I learned is that I’m probably breathing too much. This seems bit counterintuitive, because our body should regulate this for us, right? Well, it actually makes perfect sense in practice. Our bodies need a certain amount of oxygen to operate properly, which we get through breathing while releasing carbon dioxide back into the air. When we breathe too much or too often, we’re overflowing our system with oxygen and re-supplying our body with reinforcements before they’re actually necessary. As I understand it, we need the balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen to help pump oxygen to all the places it needs to be. With an overflow of oxygen in the bloodstream, we’re introducing more oxygen into the system than the carbon dioxide being created, causing oxygen to stay in the system longer. This can result in us losing our breath quicker when exercising and can limit the effectiveness of the oxygen we take in. In theory, we can train our bodies to be more effective with less oxygen by withholding the breath and limiting oxygen intake. At first I thought this was crazy until I heard about Emil Zatopek, a Czech runner who trained by voluntarily holding his breath while running for as long as he could to strengthen his lung capacity. The man was definitely a bit crazy, but also inspired entire generations of athletes to follow in his footsteps with similar practices. The full concept as I understand involves holding a low lung volume, so little to no oxygen in the lungs to start, then exerting for as long as possible on that limited oxygen to maximize the body’s capacity under stressful conditions. Now for me, this step is a bit advanced and might be best kept for short periods on runs or during workouts in small increments. Ideally, I think that by combining a mindful breathing practice with this hypoventilation training, I can finally begin to master one of the basic human functions.

On a final note, I can already confirm at least one benefit of this new breathing style. I’ve recently been taking my lunches at the park up the road, where I’ve been spending time just thinking, walking and breathing. At first it felt weird and even sometimes difficult to consistently breathe deeply for more than a few breaths. But I stayed after it, and just kept trying to get those deep breaths in more and more. Then just two weeks ago I had my first breakthrough. I just finished a great walk at the park and was breathing better than most days, deeply and fully through the nose and out the mouth for most of the walk. Upon returning to the office, I noticed a familiar smell that I hadn’t smelt in years. Immediately I was brought back to my grade school days, when I’d walk to the office after band practice to sit in the back until dad could take me home. I remember there was always this smell to the office, like a combination of old people, candy, and fresh cut wood. Since coming back to the office as an adult I had either forgotten about it, or my sense of smell was just that damaged. Both are a little true. In any case, for the first time in almost 6 years of coming here I finally noticed this smell again that apparently never left. It’s absolutely mind boggling to think that for all this time the small was hiding right under my nose. It’s been here this whole time but my body has been too out of whack to even notice it. Either way, I’m extremely thankful to have discovered this. I’m curious what other aspects of my life are hidden behind my distorted sense of reality. The only way to find out is to keep pushing.

Thanks as always for reading. Until next time, peace.


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One response to “How Breathing Can Change Your Life”

  1. Your sister Avatar
    Your sister

    Yes, I was horrified, but the spiritual fart was hilarious. I could barely hold in my laughter! Buddha was speaking.

    I’ve learned this other breathing technique that I love— ujjayi breath. Breathe in through your nose for four counts, hold for four, exhale out your mouth for four and hold the exhale for four. You can change it up with lions breath where you stick out your tongue with a wide open mouth on the exhale. It’s weird, but amazingly satisfying.