Your breath knows before you do
Your body usually notices stress before your brain gets around to admitting it. Your shoulders creep upwards, your jaw tightens and your breathing changes, all while you're still confidently telling yourself you're fine.
Your body usually notices stress before your brain gets around to admitting it. Your shoulders creep upwards, your jaw tightens and your breathing changes, all while you’re still confidently telling yourself you’re fine.
Breathing responds constantly to what we’re doing and feeling. It speeds up when we exercise or get excited, becomes shallow when we’re tense and changes with concentration, sleep, pain and emotion. Most of this happens automatically.
But here’s what makes breathing particularly interesting: it’s both automatic and voluntary.
Your brain keeps you breathing all day without any effort from you (thankfully, because I really don’t need another daily responsibility), while at any moment you can consciously change its speed, depth or rhythm. That makes the breath a rather unique bridge between what we consciously control and our autonomic nervous system.
The yogis were onto something
Long before nervous system regulation became wellness vocabulary, yogic traditions were studying the relationship between breath, energy and mind through pranayama.
And pranayama is much broader than breathing slowly to relax. Different techniques were traditionally used to energise, focus, balance and prepare the mind for meditation. Some involve changing the rhythm, others alternate the nostrils or introduce breath retention.
Today, physiology and neuroscience give us another way of looking at some of those effects. Slow breathing, for example, can influence autonomic activity, and your heart rate naturally speeds up slightly as you inhale and slows as you exhale.
Your body has essentially been practising tiny shifts between activation and recovery with every breath you’ve ever taken.
Start by paying attention
One of the most useful things I’ve learned from pranayama is simply to notice my breathing outside of practice: while answering emails, training, driving, before teaching or lying in bed suddenly remembering seventeen things that apparently need solving at midnight.
Is it fast? Am I holding it? Where do I feel it? What happens when I extend the exhale?
You don’t always need to change it.
Sometimes the breath is simply giving you information.
And considering you’ll take roughly 20,000 of them today anyway, you might as well occasionally listen.