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“Only those that know how to breathe will survive.” – Pundit Acharya

 

A couple years ago, I was visiting my hometown of Detroit to help Joan, my 85-year-old Irish mother, recover from a bout in the hospital. We walked down to the exercise room in the basement of the apartment complex where she lived. It was a small, windowless room with mirrors and fluorescent lights.

As uninspiring as the space was, it had all we needed to help Mom learn her new rehab exercises to start rebuilding her strength and mobility. What became immediately apparent to me was Joan’s breathing. It was shallow and completely disassociated from her movements. 

It soon dawned on me that she had never been taught, in 80 years, how to consciously breathe, and, moreover, how to link breath and movement. Sure, breathing was something she did, and certainly well enough to give birth to seven children and make it to 85. But she had never learned a mindful way of using breath to help her optimize the benefits of exercise, manage stress and maintain balance. 

For my parents’ generation, and much of my own, unless you were an athlete, martial artist, physical therapist, or yogi, there is a good chance that mastering the art of mindful breathing was not part of your foundational learning principles. 

But why not? What could be more essential to master than our own breath? I can’t think of a more immediately accessible, nor more effective opportunity for enhancing our lives than taking full advantage of that which is right under our nose – our own breath.  

In their book, Breathe In, Breathe Out, Jeffrey Migdown and co-author and peak performance guru James Loehr highlight breath’s essential nature. “Life begins with your first breath,” they write. “You will breathe in oxygen 10 to 16 or more times in the next minute. You will take one hundred million breaths before you take your last.” That’s a lot of opportunities for enhancing our capacity for a healthier, happier life.

 

Peak Performance

In addition to reducing stress, improving our health, and helping us move through our daily routines or yoga practice with more energy and focus, breath is the No. 1 technique of nearly all peak performers—from NBA stars to Olympic athletes and Navy Seals. In Breath In, Breath Out, Loehr tells us, 

“The key to emotional control is breath control. Breath control is the ultimate weapon. It is the simplest, safest, cheapest, most accessible handle there is for mastering emotional control, for recharging the Ideal Performance State in response to problems, for staying in control, for becoming a peak performer.”  

 

Health Essentials

Optimizing our breath, and learning to use and practice deep and conscious breathing, is key to not only our physical health and performance, but also to our mental and emotional state. It is almost impossible for the system to be stressed when you are breathing slow, deep and steady. 

According to Donna Farhi, author of The Breathing Book, “Breathing affects your respiratory, cardiovascular, neurological, gastrointestinal, muscular and psychic systems, and also has a general effect on your sleep, memory, ability to concentrate, and your energy levels.” 

Breath, and the lifeforce it carries, impacts every cell and system in our mind and body. Take the access to breath away for more than two to three minutes, and that lifeforce will cease.

 

Breath: The River and the Bridge 

In an energetic sense, breath contains our life-force—also known as Prana in the Vedic sciences or Qi in a number of Eastern disciplines and modalities. We can think of the breath as the flowing river that carries the life-giving prana in and out of our bodies. 

There is a saying in yoga that our life is not determined by the number of years we will live, but by the number of breaths we are given. Simply translated: The deeper and longer we make each breath, the fuller and longer life we will live. 

In addition to being the river that carries life force into our systems, breath is the bridge between our mind, our physical body, and our energy body. Breath both nurtures and unifies. 

 

Optimal Breathing

Science has proven that deepening and lengthening our breathing (i.e., slowing down and paying attention) shifts us from the sympathetic stress response to the relaxation response. 

Our optimal breathing rate is sometimes referred to as our resonant rate—the rate at which we can switch on our parasympathetic nervous system (relaxation state), slow our brain waves and heart rate, and allow for greater calm, presence and coherence. 

In her book The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal tells us that one way to immediately boost our willpower is to slow our breathing down to four to six breaths per minute, which is considered by many experts on the subject to be our optimal breath rate. Slowing our breath to this rate helps us regulate our nervous system and achieve more consistent states of focus and flow.

 

Out with the Bad and In with the Good 

Not only does deeper breathing bring more oxygen and prana into our system, it carries more carbon dioxide and toxins out, helping to maintain the right balance of oxygen and C02 in our systems. According to Al Lee and Don Campbell in their book Perfect Breathing, 70% of the toxic waste that our bodies generate is removed through our breathing. 

Without a sufficient level in the flow of our breath to clear these toxins, they build up, making us sluggish and eventually sick. This is also one of the reasons that aerobic exercise has so many benefits to our system. It is accompanied by an increase in our breathy capacity, heart pumping higher levels of oxygen to the cells, and the removals of toxins. 

Bringing intention and mindfulness, as well as stimulation through movement and breathing practices, we develop a deeper breath, more energy and a greater capacity for a full and vital life. If you want more four to five times more energy and less stress, just add more breath. 

 

The 60-Second Energy Reset

Why not take a pause now and try?  It will only take a minute.

• Take a deep, full breath through your nose into your diaphragm, expanding fully.
• Pause briefly, then exhale a slightly longer breath out through your nose as you draw your navel toward your spine and relax.
• Do it again. Take another deep, full breath. Let it out slowly.
• And again.
• Establish a nice, quiet rhythm. Always exhale slightly more slowly than you inhale.
• Within 60 seconds  you should feel calmer and more relaxed.

Here’s to breathing our way to new levels of vitality, happiness and longevity.

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About the Author 

Frank Fitzpatrick is a Creative Visioneer, Engagement Expert and High-Performance Coach on the Faculty of Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine.

To connect, go to FrankFitzpatrick.com

To learn more about working 1-on1 with Frank, go to BeyondPerformance.Life