EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE COULD BE HEALING YOU ‘If anything good has come out of Covid, it’s that we’re more aware of our breathing’
It’s so instinctive, we never even give it a thought. But the way we inhale and exhale could have more effect on our health and wellbeing than diet, exercise and genes
I’D LIKE YOU to do something: take a breath. Nothing unusual about that. But as you breathe in, consider that in just that one breath the air now passing down your throat into your lungs and bloodstream contains more molecules than all the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches.
We each inhale and exhale some 30lb of these molecules every day – far more than we eat or drink. And the ways in which we take in that air and exhale it is as important to our health as what we eat, how much we exercise, or whatever genes we’ve inherited.
This sounds crazy. It certainly sounded that way to me when I first heard about it years ago. But this is exactly what neurologists, rhinologists, and pulmonologists working at some of the world’s most prestigious research centres are now proving.
Simply changing the ways in which we breathe can help blunt the symptoms of several chronic diseases, heal our bodies on command, or help us to live a longer and healthier life.
The problem is that so few of us are breathing correctly. Just look at the numbers: nine per cent of us have asthma. Fifty per cent of us snore and about a quarter of us suffer from the chronic night-time asphyxia known as sleep apnoea.
Up to a quarter of the population also suffers from serious overbreathing and it’s estimated that as many as 50 per cent of us inhale through our mouths, not our noses. And the consequences are wreaking havoc on our health.
So many conditions, from hypertension (high blood pressure) to neurological disorders, from anxiety to metabolic diseases, can be either exacerbated – or sometimes even caused – by poor breathing habits. And, conversely, improving our breathing habits can have a significant impact on our wellbeing. It takes little effort and costs nothing.
There are no side effects. In fact, the worst thing that can happen is that you’ll feel better. So here are a few things to try: Breathe through your nose.
The nose filters, humidifies, conditions, and moistens air that comes into the body. It removes particulate, pollutants, even helps kill off viruses. It also triggers hormones, increases circulation, and delivers 20 per cent more oxygen than mouth breathing.
Simply breathing through the nose has been shown to reduce snoring and help some cases of sleep apnea.
This is because the nose helps create more pressure in the airway which works to push back the soft tissues that can obstruct easy breaths.
Next, breathe a little slower, extend those exhales a little longer.
Try it. For the next several minutes (say, the time it takes you to read the rest of this article) inhale to a count of about five while exhaling at the same count, or a little longer if you can.
This works out to about six breaths a minute. Don’t worry if you’re a second or two off.The point is to make sure you are relaxed and comfortable.
When we breathe like this, circulation to the brain and body increases while the stress on the heart relaxes.
The respiratory and nervous systems enter a state of coherence where everything functions at peak efficiency with the least effort.
JUST a few minutes of inhaling and exhaling at this pace can drop high blood pressure by 10, even 15 points. (If you’ve got a blood pressure monitor, measure your stats before-and-after and see for yourself.)
New York psychiatrists and authors, Dr Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg, found patients who practised these slow-and-low breaths could lessen the symptoms of anxiety and depression.
It even helped 9/11 survivors restore lung damage caused by debris, a horrendous condition called ground-glass lungs. Where all other therapies failed, such controlled breathing offered significant improvement. If we keep at it and continue to build healthy
breathing habits we can help maintain good health while reducing, or in some remarkable cases, reversing those modern day maladies that now affect the majority of the population: all that asthma, those allergies, and even autoimmune diseases. Take, for instance, Carl Stough, a New Jersey choral conductor who in the ’50s and ’60s developed a deep and slow diaphragmatic breathing method to help singers improve the resonance of their voices.
Using the same practice, Stough treated patients suffering from emphysema at the large hospitals on America’s east coast. Several of these patients had been bedridden for years, given a steady diet of antibiotics and oxygen, but to no avail.
Many were close to death.Yet Stough rehabilitated the patients by teaching them how to breathe properly.
He showed them how to develop their weakened lungs and atrophied diaphragms, which at the time, was supposed to have been medically impossible. But X-rays proved it had happened, and patients left for dead walked out of the hospital.
Then there was Katharina Schroth, a German teenager living in Dresden in the early 1900s who’d been diagnosed with scoliosis and left to live the rest of her life in bed or a wheelchair.
Over five years, Schroth developed and used a technique called “orthopedic breathing”. She too did the “impossible” – she stretched and breathed her spine straight, then went on to teach hundreds of others to do the same. After decades of derision by the German medical establishment, Schroth was awarded a medal for her contributions to medicine.
This teenager condemned to live a short, wheelchair-bound life died just three days shy of her 91st birthday.
There are dozens of other people who have transformed their lives through improved breathing: a French hairdresser who recovered from chronic lung disease and went on to run 150 miles in the Sahara Desert at the age of 68; an opera singer who (according to her notes) hiked alone through the Himalayas for 19 hours at a time without food or water, using only her breath to keep her warm and nourished; a Ukrainian cardiologist who found breathing exercises to effectively “cure” patients of chronic asthma.
They produced piles of research – videos, X-rays, data sheets – proving their claims.
So, why haven’t we heard of these people and why aren’t we all using their practices? For some reason, in some way, Stough, Schroth, and almost every other breathing researcher I’d come across was largely ignored during their lives. Several were censured.
When these people died, whatever ancient secrets they’d unearthed were scattered and forgotten. This went on for decades.
I’ve come to believe that at least some of the resistance has had to do with the medicine they were prescribing: air.
Many scientists of the past have poohpoohed the idea that we might affect the structure of our bodies, bones, and tissues right down to the cellular level by just changing how we inhale and exhale. Even today, with reams of literature now proving its efficacy, healthy breathing isn’t taught in medical school. Few doctors have even heard of it; even fewer prescribe it.
That’s starting to change. If there’s anything good to have come out of this foul Covid pandemic, it’s that it’s made us more acutely aware of our breathing. Hospitals are now using breathing techniques to help patients better overcome the symptoms of viral pneumonia. They are now laying patients on their sides or stomachs instead of their backs so that they can breathe better while sleeping or resting. But these practices, like all other breath practices used by all these people over all these centuries, are nothing new. They’ve been with us for hundreds, even thousands of years.
THEY were inscribed within the statues of the Indus Valley more than 4,000 years ago. They were refined by Chinese doctors before 400BC. They were codified and organised in India centuries after that and practised by tens of millions of Buddhists, yogis, and monks for the past two millennia.
Finally, modern scientists at Harvard, Stanford, and other esteemed US institutions are proving so many of these ancient practices can have a profound impact on our health, happiness, and longevity. It requires no batteries, wi-fi, headgear, or smartphones. It costs nothing, takes little time and effort. It’s a technique our ancestors have been perfecting with only their lips, noses, and lungs for thousands of years. How we breathe, they all discovered, really matters.
I only hope this time we won’t forget it.
● Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor (Penguin Life, 16.99). For your copy with free UK delivery, call The Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or go to expressbookshop.co.uk. Delivery may take 28 days