Breathe easy

We take 20,000 breaths a day, yet most of us are doing it wrong. Rebecca Newman discovers that learning to breathe properly may just transform your life

Transform your life with one health hack.

Achallenge of motherhood I hadn’t expected was postnatal depression. Around the birth of my baby, Luke, last year, things were hard. On a bad day I felt sucked underwater, struggling for air. It’s getting better, but it’s evolved into a less stifling but still persistent anxiety. I’ve noticed an ongoing sense of breathlessness. I feel the air getting stuck at the top of my chest, as though I don’t deserve to take in more of the oxygen around me. So it was with some excitement that I started to read about the restorative power of better breathing.

It sounds so simple. While resting, adults breathe about 12-20 times per minute, yet many of us might be doing it ineffectively. Advocates, including Lena Dunham, Karlie Kloss and a host of medical experts, believe regular, mindful breath work can bring a sense of calm, lower blood pressure, help mental acuity and improve health and fitness. “If I had to limit advice on healthier living to one tip, it would be [learning] how to breathe correctly,” says integrative medicine expert Dr Andrew Weil.

So I book in to see Transformational Breath (TB) facilitator Rebecca Dennis (yes, that job actually exists). I arrive at her studio with moderate expectations. I’ve tried meditation where the focus is breathing, but my mind wanders. And anyway, who wants to be the creepy tantric-yoga person with the ostentatiously groaning exhale?

Dennis radiates calm, all big grins and glowing skin. It’s hard to see her as the person she describes in her book And Breathe, so beaten down by depression that she attempted suicide. She says breathing is what brought her back. “As babies, we breathe deeply from our belly,” she tells me. “But most adults breathe with just their chest. Often this is down to stress – we feel too busy to breathe, and get by on half-breaths.” These breaths send messages to our brain that we’re in a fightor-flight survival mode, spiking levels of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, and leading to health complaints such as poor digestion and anxiety. TB is designed to take you back to breathing deep, diaphragmatic breaths, to improve physical and mental health. By strengthening your diaphragm, it can also give you a flatter stomach, though these days I’d settle for a more even blood pressure. When Dennis asks what I’d like to achieve in the session, I answer, “Serenity.”

Lying on the floor, I follow her instructions to open my mouth wide and breathe in for two counts then immediately out in a “rolling” breath. It requires full focus, and soon I feel a peculiar tingling in my hands. As I breathe, Dennis massages acupressure points on my body to release tension and whispers encouragement. When we finish, I feel oddly, deeply renewed. I hadn’t expected this just from breathing.

I ask Dennis who will benefit from it. She reels off satisfied clients: a CEO with panic attacks, a lady with fertility issues (who, on learning TB, became pregnant), a boxer who improved his fighting skills. “Anyone,” she says. “This is why there is a surging interest in breath work, because so many people are stressed.”

Belief that breathing is good for you has been around for centuries. Buddha, for example, stated that mindful breathing, developed and repeatedly practised, “is of great fruit, of great benefit”. He left instruction on breath meditation in a text, Anapanasati Sutta. Following on from Buddhism, some branches of yoga are more focused on breathing. In kundalini yoga, energetic breath work, or pranayama, is the bridge between the mind and body. “Breathing makes you immediately calmer and connected,” says Maya Fiennes, the yoga teacher whom Elle Macpherson dubs inspirational. In kundalini yoga, breath techniques are used to arouse kundalini energy, said to rest at the base of the spine. “Your breath brings your kundalini energy from the lower chakras and bursting up through the crown of your head.”

I’m still not convinced about chakras, so I look up psychologist Dr Emma Seppälä. Her TEDX Talk, Breathing Happiness, refers to a study that found not only do emotions have their own breathing patterns, but also that if you breathe according to the pattern associated with anger, calm or happiness, you will trigger that emotion. “It’s revolutionary. We can change how we feel using our breath,” she says. And she’s right: should your friend’s dog pee on your suede boots, deep breaths can transmute the most murderous intent (trust me).

Seppälä set up a yogic breathing workshop for war veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. Exercises included ujjayi (victorious) breathing, a slow breath where you consciously experience the air touching the throat, and bhastrika (bellows) breathing, where air is rapidly inhaled and forcefully exhaled. “After six days, veterans who said they had felt ‘dead’ since returning from Iraq said they felt alive again,” says Seppälä. “Several studies suggest yogic breathing has positive effects on psychological wellbeing, blood pressure and heart rate. By activating the parasympathetic nervous system, in charge of ‘resting and digesting’, breathing can train the body to be calmer.” If it can work on ex-soldiers, then surely it could work for me.

Yogic breathing can also make a big difference when working out; once you’ve practised “learning to breathe” through your nose, apply the technique to exercise, as oxygen and carbon dioxide are thought to be best exchanged nasally. On the in-breath, the diaphragm contracts, expanding the lungs and drawing air through the nose. It’s then pulled through the wind pipe into the lungs’ tiny air chambers. The oxygenated blood flows to the heart and is pumped around the body enabling cellular respiration (needed for most cellular activity). More oxygen in and more CO₂ out equals more energy generated. But it’s not all science. During sex, conscious breathing can heighten intimacy if you synchronise your breath with your lover’s. In resistance training, breathing can be used as a way to hold the torso correctly. “Exhalation engages the core, which supports the spine, reducing chance of injury,” explains personal trainer Neil Dimmock. Breath work can also give us better control of our life, according to Michael Townsend Williams’ book Do Breathe: Calm Your Mind.

Find Focus. Get Stuff Done. Townsend Williams was an advertising producer who was managing an alcohol addiction. He reached a nadir when his brother died falling from a balcony, but his salvation was breath work. The book explains how using the breath as an anchor can improve our focus, flow and productivity. “Awareness of our breath enables us to get in the zone to do our best work,” he tells me. The response to the book was so strong, he launched an app, Breathesync. He notes, “So many people enjoyed Do Breathe, from entrepreneurs to someone who bought a copy for a friend who was breathless because of lung cancer, who told me the book kept her going until the very end.”

Breathing is free, and you can practise it properly just about anywhere. I do it at work, in the stationery cupboard. I swear it makes a difference to how much I achieve in a day. You can even do it on the train or in the checkout line. It might just change your life.