If you're new to breathwork as a wellness practice, it's important to first understand the basics. As humans, we are inherently inclined to breathe poorly. Correcting your breathing technique will help carry you through everyday life and improve your energy, focus, sleep quality and more.
Key takeaways
- Breathwork helps guide your breathing pattern to benefit your mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health.
- Exhibiting symptoms of poor breathing may inadvertently be harming your health.
- Breathwork has several health benefits such as improved sleep quality, focus, and energy and reduced stress and anxiety.
If you’re new to breathwork as mindfulness practice, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the basics. As with any new wellness regimen, proper technique and consistency with your breathing practice is key to yielding the best results. In this article, we’ll cover the basics of what breathwork is, the life-changing benefits of changing your breath pattern, popular methods, and the essential practices for beginners.
What Is Breathwork?
Breathwork is the practice of intentionally changing your breathing pattern to elicit different mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual benefits. Many people use breathwork practices for a variety of concerns, including:
- Breathwork for stress and anxiety
- Breathwork for sleep quality
- Breathwork for energy
- Breathwork for focus
- Breathwork for athletic performance
- Breathwork for meditation
These needs are the normal result of the current societal state that we live in. With so many outside stress-inducing forces in our lives, having a breathwork practice is just one way we can regain control of our well-being. The quality of your breath influences the quality of your life, so incorporating short, guided breathwork techniques into your everyday routine will greatly benefit your overall health.
As a mindfulness technique that has been used for centuries, breathwork aims to help your body release toxins and stress when you exhale and nourish your body when you inhale. But, it’s so much more than just simply breathing in and out. Our breathing is directly connected to our nervous system, meaning that each and every breath we take impacts our physical and mental state.
Why We Breathe Poorly
Poor everyday breathing is the result of many factors, most notably high levels of chronic stress, which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, changes in our facial development over time have led to narrower airways than our ancestors. This is one of the many factors causing us to become habitual mouth breathers (Nestor 2020). There are also societal pressures that affect the way we breathe - unrealistic beauty standards have made us uncomfortable releasing our bellies. Instead, we push our breath into our upper chest and do not properly activate our diaphragms to take deeper and more efficient breaths (Vranich 2016).
How can you tell if you might have dysfunctional breathing? Some signs to watch out for include:
- Mouth breathing (while awake and asleep)
- Breathing that is concentrated in the upper chest and shoulders
- Audible breathing at rest
- Fast breathing
- Frequent yawns or sighs throughout the day
If you commonly experience any of these symptoms, you could inadvertently be harming your health due to the negative effects of poor breathing.
6 Benefits of Breathwork
Reduce Stress Levels
Stress is a natural part of everyone’s daily lifestyle, whether we like it or not. While we can’t cut out stress-inducing events and thoughts entirely, we can improve the way we respond to them. Breathwork and breathing exercises are often a commonly recommended coping mechanism for individuals who experience high levels of stress. Incorporating down-regulating breathwork practices like deep belly breathing at slow rates helps our heart, lungs, and nervous system to recenter and work in tandem. As a result, the gas exchange in our lungs improves and our heart rate variability (HRV), which is an overall indicator of health and wellness, is maximized.
Improve Sleep Quality
In addition to coping with stress, down-regulating breathwork is also often used to improve sleep quality. Practicing deep, slow breathing with long exhalations before bed helps bring a sense of calmness over your entire body, because your body is encouraged to spend more time in the parasympathetic state. Using the 40/60 rule — where 40% of the breath is inhaling and 60% is exhaling (Khazan 2019; Lagos 2020) — ultimately helps you to fall asleep faster.
Enhance Meditation
Despite the common misconception that breathwork and meditation are synonymous, both practices are inherently different. However, they do tend to go hand-in-hand quite often. If you’re looking to dive deeper with your current daily meditation practice, bringing consciousness to your breathwork is a great way to do so. Using down-regulating techniques will instantly help shift your focus and quiet your mind so you can spend more time settling into the silence of your meditation practice.
Increase Energy
While down-regulating breathwork practices are great for calming your mind and body, up-regularing breathwork practices are beneficial if you’re looking to increase your energy levels. Because breathwork is the most natural and sustainable practice your body can partake in, up-regulating breathwork for increased energy eliminates the need for caffeine supplements like coffee, energy drinks, or medication. Removing this chemical element and focusing only on natural up-regulating breathing techniques also reduces the risk of the dreaded midday crash and negative effects to your sleep.
Improve Athletic Performance
Breathwork techniques have also been proven to help improve athletic performance for both full-time athletes and individuals who simply choose to incorporate exercise into their everyday routine. Bringing a breathwork practice into your physical fitness regimen helps to slow the onset of breathlessness by improving oxygen uptake and speeding up your body’s recovery. Using breathwork before, during, and after physical fitness workouts often results in increased muscle strength, improved lung capacity, and overall better performance.
Boost Your Mood
Breathwork practices yield mental and emotional benefits just as much as physical benefits. For example, transformational 3-part breathwork exercises are specifically designed to help improve emotional healing, spiritual growth, and self-discovery. When prioritizing these practices and improving your emotional and spiritual well-being, your body is able to relax and elicit a feeling of euphoria.