In the quick guide to breathing ebook and in the first two supporting articles (article one and article two), you learned the rib cage awareness exercise, which also served as a mindfulness exercise because it brings you into the current moment and encourages you to put your focus on relaxed, controlled breathing. This is one aspect of neuromechanics and how the brain is involved in breathing: you are deliberately influencing your brain to induce a calming sympathetic response.
You can expand on this exercise with a variation that encourages the mindfulness to be even more deliberate. It’s a version of box breathing but the inhale, hold, exhale, hold are not all the same length of time: more like rectangular breathing, but I don’t think that’s a thing…
Anyway, you can progress the holds so they are longer, but I find most people like to start with shorter breath holds and go from there. So, let’s have a look at the exercise and then we can look at other aspects of how the brain is influenced by your breathing but also how the brain itself can impact upon your breathing.
Paced Breathing Practice
- Find a comfortable position, seated or standing.
- Breathe in for a 4-count through your nose and hold for 1 second.
- Exhale slowly for a count of 4 and hold for 1 second.
- Continue the pattern of in for 4, hold for 1, out for 4, hold for 1.
- Aim to evenly pace your breathing across the 4-count of both the inhale and exhale.
- Repeat for 1 to 2 minutes, allowing yourself to relax into the exercise and avoid becoming tense or trying too hard.
- When you are ready, you can progress in three different ways:
- Extend the holds so you end up with in for 4, hold for 4, out for 4, hold for 4.
- Extend the inhale and exhale counts to 5, eventually progressing the holds to a 5-count.
- Change the inhale to a 4-count with a 1 second hold and the exhale to a 6-count with a 1 second hold.
Each of these progressions is designed to encourage even paced breathing and build your confidence with slightly longer breath holds.
Up to a point, this and similar exercises help to calm your sympathetic nervous system and are great for bringing you into the current moment. However, if you have some form of breathing challenge including dysfunctional breathing, holding your breath or even trying to pace your breathing for any length of time actually becomes a threat to your brain and this can cause panic and anxiety.
You may notice this panic feeling when you are out for a run and are pushing hard. All of a sudden you feel you can’t breathe properly and you start to panic. This is called paradoxical breathing and is where your breathing muscles are now operating almost in reverse to your inhalations and exhalations: essentially, your chest expands on the out breath instead of the in breath. Learning how to pace your breathing with the exercise above is a great start, but there is often more to it than that.
The brain with its nerves and blood supply
The Brain’s Influence On Your Breathing
Your brain is a prediction engine, using your past experiences, knowledge and learnings to predict what’s going to happen in any given moment. Actually, it makes its predictions and actually puts actions into motion a fraction of a second before you are even consciously aware of it. These predictions involve how you react to what’s going on around and inside you, all of the time. Your thoughts, actions, movements and feelings (including emotions) are all shaped by these predictions. And all of those things feed back in to help shape your predictions for future reference.
Ultimately, your brain’s number one job is your survival.
It uses your current predictive models to do what it can to ensure that you get through every day without dying or being fatally injured. Sometimes this means it needs to take drastic action like producing an experience of pain, panic, anxiety, fatigue and other outcomes we would interpret as being undesirable. These are simply your brain’s way of reducing or avoiding what it perceives to be a threatening situation, even if it has got it wrong – this does happen which often leads to chronic pain conditions and other health challenges, both mental and with physical manifestations.
So, one of the reasons I always begin teaching efficient and functional breathing by becoming aware of the muscles of breathing and mobilising the rib cage, is that it helps to build more helpful predictive models around how you breathe in different situations. If your brain knows how to move your rib cage in a way that can create more space for your lungs to do their job, and knows that you have good activation and relaxation of the muscles involved, it is more likely to trust that you’ll be safe. In terms of your breathing, this means your brain is less likely to go into a panic state because it knows how to breathe under load.
Brain-safety is super important and part of the reason that you may get panicky when you do longer breath holds, particularly if you’ve just exhaled, is because your brain feels unsafe and doesn’t know when more oxygen will be available: no oxygen = eventual death.
But this prediction isn’t just based on a mechanical trigger, although one of those does exist. Actually, it’s not a mechanical trigger, it’s a chemical one. The longer you hold your breath, the more you will get a build up of carbon dioxide, and this happens more quickly after an exhale breath hold and even more so if you are moving. High levels of carbon dioxide build up in the blood is a condition known as hypercapnia, and this usually triggers your diaphragm to take an in-breath. If you try holding your breath for a long time you will feel your diaphragm starting to activate and it’s very hard to to override, if not impossible.
While hypercapnia training is a very important part of how I teach more efficient and functional breathing, especially for runners and active people, it’s introduced gradually and I always take into account the other reasons that can bring on panic during breath holds.
Remember that the brain is a prediction engine? Well, your predictive models are being shaped continually: every experience in every moment is influencing your predictive models and therefore helping to create how you react in future moments. Perhaps at some point in your life you had an unpleasant or unhelpful experience related to being out of breath. Maybe it wasn’t even you and it was a family member, friend or even just someone you observed. It could even have been a movie you watched, an article you read, something someone told you or something you experienced, read or watched online. All of these things shape your predictive models, and if there was something in there somewhere that caused your brain to believe, rightly or wrongly, that being without oxygen even for a short time would be unsafe, then it’s not going to let you do that.
As soon as you get into a situation where the carbon dioxide build up is even remotely triggering a lack of oxygen, your brain predicts the worst and literally hits the panic button. If you are out running at the time, this may result in you needing to stop or slow right down and reset your breathing.
And to add to the complexity, because your brain is predicting just ahead of your conscious awareness, other situations where your brain feels unsafe can trigger the same reaction before you have any conscious control. For example, have you ever felt fear and your breathing has gone into a panic state as a result? How about embarrassment triggering the same thing? All of these things can be perceived as threatening and your brain is using panic breathing to warn you to change something – most often it’s to warn you to get out of the threatening situation.
Phew! So, the difference between how I teach people to improve their breathing and the way most other courses and instructors teach it, is that I also take into account the neuromechanics (or neuro-biomechanics) and the neurology and the role that your brain plays in your breathing. I teach extra exercises that may appear to have nothing to do with breathing (such as tongue exercises) but help your brain to feel safe by stimulating specific nerves and neural and spinal pathways. By first teaching you how to move well and use your breathing muscles, you are creating improved brain-body mapping and building more helpful predictive models. These in turn help your brain to feel safe so it can get on with learning how to breathe well. This can often be a challenging concept, but it’s firmly rooted in science and has proven to be highly effective.
Conclusion
This article is certainly more in-depth than the first two, but the role of your brain and nervous system in your breathing is so important it requires you to appreciate the importance of working with them in order to quickly and efficiently improve your breathing. Just spending time on standard breathing exercises doesn’t cut it in my book. It will usually take a long time to get good at breathing and more often than not you’ll give up before you see the real results and benefits.
So, you can influence your brain by how you breathe: efficient and functional breathing helps your brain feel safe and can reduce panic and anxiety, and also helps to improve your performance and overall well being. All of this helps to build more helpful predictive models for future reference.
And, your brain can also directly impact how you breathe and the quality of your breathing – I’m sure you’ve spotted the circular feedforward loop in there where one feeds into the other.
To achieve efficient and functional breathing when running, and in the rest of your life, you need to help your brain feel safe and this involves training it in complementary ways and providing it with the most helpful predictive models you can.
In the next article we’ll look in more detail at carbon dioxide and the biochemistry of breathing.
