What if it turned out that most of the world’s problems could be traced to one simple, easily correctable deficit: impaired oxygenation. That much of the greed, wars, violence, health and financial crises, and assorted other human suffering was simply the inescapable result of insufficiently oxygenated brain tissue. Stick with me on this for a bit.
Fundamentally, you, me and all of us are going to die from the same single cause: lack of oxygen to the brain. Every death is ultimately the result of oxygen deprivation. If I get shot through the heart, my heart stops pumping freshly oxygenated blood to the brain and my brain stops working soon afterward. If I get lung cancer, rapidly replicating cells form tumors in my lungs. These tumors crowd out healthy tissue until my lungs are no longer able to supply oxygenated blood to my heart to transfer to my brain. Death results. If I smash my car into a bridge abutment with no airbags or seat belt, my head goes through the windshield and my brain smashes into the bridge concrete. Oxygen is suddenly deprived of a brain to travel to. My life comes to an end.
The Breathing Benefits of Sleep
So, oxygen is the gas of life. One of the many benefits of sleep is that we get to breathe in a regular, uninterrupted fashion for an extended period of time, systematically refueling the brain. My guess is that restful sleep has a positive effect on the generation and connectivity of neurons as well. Interestingly, as might be predicted, once their disorder was corrected, research on kids with sleep-disordered breathing showed marked improvement by way of reduced hyperactivity, increased attention spans and less daytime sleepiness. Getting better sleep seems to have positively affected their brains.
So, how well we’re able to breathe at night affects our functioning during the day. Is it too far a stretch to imagine that how we breathe during the day might also profoundly affect us during the day as well?
A Little Death in Every Breath
Suppose we die a kind of mini-death every time we involuntarily or unconsciously hold back an out-breath? Tai Chi Master William C. C. Chen believes that many of the activities of modern life work to constantly interrupt our natural breathing patterns. A random thought, a ringing cell phone, a honking car horn – all can cut an out-breath short, making us inhale before we’ve completely exhaled (I once had someone insult me by calling me a “shallow, mouth-breather!”).
Neurologist Bob Scaer argues that it’s the “Freeze Response” during which we hold our breath and immobilize our body, which results in retained traumatic memories ending up as collections of encapsulated neurons that he calls dissociation capsules. Such collections of neurons appear to go offline, temporarily lost to the network, significantly reducing processing power (Interestingly, L. Ron Hubbard, the creator of Scientology, identified these retained painful memories as engrams and, using an early biofeedback potentiometer he called the e-meter, actually found a way to activate and integrate the neurons holding these memories back into the network. I think this accounted for a lot of Scientology’s early popularity … the process of recalling memories and being able to give voice to them appears to be a process that successfully discharges the emotional reactivity of traumatic memories. Which is what Scientology did for people like Tom Cruise, Jerry Seinfeld, Van Morrison, Juliette Lewis, Sharon Stone and John Travolta. And because the brain is an associative organ, it’s easy to mistakenly associate and attribute healing processes and integrative experiences with the organization that orchestrated them. But, I digress).
Breath and Spirit
I don’t think it’s an accident that any number of spiritual traditions, martial arts and contemplative practices find various ways to practice and incorporate conscious attention to breathing. It is this attentive practice that allows us to add sustained, consistent day-breathing to the restorative night-breathing we do as a matter of course. My hypothesis would be that adding this resource, underwrites neural enrichment, facilitating more and more neural growth and connectivity. That resulting growth and connectivity would result in greater ease in managing daily stress, provide increased ability to move toward things that customarily make us anxious, and expand the neural base that we normally engage the world from.
Gaming the Breath
So what’s the takeaway? Essentially we can make a game with our kids out of paying closer attention to our breathing. We can begin to notice what kinds of interactions and experiences bring our breath up short; what kinds of thoughts bring the breath to a full stop; what the requirements are for being able to breathe fully in and fully out without restriction for five, ten, twenty breaths in a row. My hunch is it will affect us subtly at first, but with practice, over time, breath-remembering will begin to pay big dividends for heart, mind, body and brain. Could attaining lasting peace and ongoing prosperity really be that simple?
Hi Mark. Ahhh, breathing in, I breathe in. Thank you for such a great column. I give a lot of “airtime” to breathing and sleep in my recommendations. They also are my top two recommended practices for the highly anxious, who are getting feedback to stay hyper-aroused from both internal and external triggers that may take a long time to detect. Breathing is a fast and simple healing practice.
Despite what I think is “no brainer” advice, I still have people with apnea who will not use their machines at night. A former intern did a paper in Neuropsychology, describing the subtle cognitive deficits emergent with apnea. Your column made me wonder if such anoxic events aren’t really hypoxic, so neurons don’t die, but do end up in wiring clusters that are maladaptive, much like muscle bracing patterns in the body, which may be a somatic representation of that neural organization. Things to ponder.
All that said, here is a link to one of my favorite martial artists (Aikido master) who has NLP, Ericksonian and varied Japanese healing arts training with some of his written practices for breathwork that I offer to you along with a huge thank you for always being so “thoughtful” and stimulating.
You likely have these practices “wired” and perhaps there will be something useful here to know as well.
http://www.seishindo.org/_practices_index.html
My best to you. Julie
Hi Mark,
I wonder if you have heard of Buyteko breathing. I have asthma and have found using some of their techniques very helpful. The basic premise is that asthmatic’s over breathe and so there is not enough time for their body to use the carbon dioxide inhaled and so airways constrict to try and keep in the co2. One technique that I found very beneficial is to put paper tape over my mouth at night when asleep to stop me breathing through my mouth and losing too much carbon dioxide. I now have far fewer wheezing mornings.
Carole
As a child, I was a “shallow, mouth-breather” because my dad was a heavy smoker and I hated the smell. So this article makes me wonder about the long-term developmental effects on children of smokers.
Thanks, Mark, for addressing an increasingly important topic: the inability to breathe properly and how that can adversely affect…well…just about everything in your life!
Here’s an added perspective: an inability to breathe deeply is also directly related to muscular habituation. Both Moshe Feldenkrais, and then Thoma Hanna, taught that lack of control of the muscles associated with breathing directly afffected the ability to breathe. Hanna went on to teach about the “startle reflex” (he calls it the “red light reflex” – page 58 in the book SOMATICS), a primitive brain stem reflex that occurs in response to real or imagined danger. Imagine someone yelling at you constantly, or someone sneaking up behind you and scaring you. What would happen is this: you would instantly contract the abdominals as you round and hunch the shoulders and pull inward. The ribcage would pull downward, you’d hold your breath, and pull the head forward. Animals do this as well. This reflex can save our lives, however, if it becomes habituated (again, imagine a child raised in a household with constant criticism or violence), you will literally lose the voluntary ability to relax and release the muscles of breathing. Your posture will be stooped slightly, and you will be a shallow thoracic breather (or mouth breather). Kids with asthma, and those hunching over a computer 10 hours a day can habituate to this posture as well. Becoming aware of how you somatically respond (“somatic” meaning how you experience things from the inside out) is the only way to change what you’re doing.
In my work with Hanna Somatic Education, I find that 100% of clients experiencing chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, difficulty walking, depression and stooped posture have rigid abdominal muscles. For most women it can be cultural, a result of being taught to “suck it in” to look thin, for others they have habituated, somatically, the emotional response to unhappiness, fear or anxiety.
There are many wonderful methods out there to teach one to regain control of breathing. Add to that Hanna Somatic Education, which addresses full body somatic patterns of stress response.
[…] tense, and I often end up withholding an outbreath. I’ve written previously about the potentialadverse effects of interrupted breathing patterns on health and well-being, but I think the biggest challenge with […]