The Power of Your Breath

QI’ve heard many times that the breath is important, but to be honest, I haven’t fully understood why. What is so special about the breath?

AThe breath is one of your fastest ways to control and regulate how you feel in the present moment. It helps you handle moments of anxiety and stress. It helps you control your energy levels. It even improves your sexual “performance”. But most importantly, it shapes how you go through life in general.

QThat makes sense, but how exactly does the breath do all this?

ATo answer this, we have to understand two important things.

First: as a human being, you exist on multiple planes, so to speak. By planes I mean your physical existence (the body), your mental existence (the ego/mind) and your spiritual existence (the soul). I don’t want to go into too much detail on these planes now. All we need to understand is that they are very different, yet they overlap and influence each other. So every change you make on a physical level also has an impact on your mental existence.

Second: the breath is closely tied to your nervous system. More precisely, it is tied to your parasympathetic nervous system (in charge of relaxation, recovery and your baseline functions) and your sympathetic nervous system (prepares your body for stress, high energy or danger). Different ways of breathing activate one or the other.

Without making this too complicated, you can follow one simple guideline: if you consciously exhale longer than you inhale, you activate the parasympathetic nervous system and get yourself into more relaxed, peaceful and creative states. If your inhales are longer than your exhales, you energize your body and brain, which causes feelings of excitement, readiness and activation.

QI see how the breath is related to my states of being, but what does that have to do with how I go through life?

AWell, a stressed nervous system makes you more anxious during the day. It might make you see problems where there really are none. It might make you argue with a loved one, even though the situation wasn’t a big deal. It gives you a more pessimistic outlook on life.

QI see. But how do I actually control my breath? I feel like it’s impossible to focus on my breath all the time.

AThe good news is that you don’t have to control anything in the beginning. All you need to do is check in with yourself regularly for a couple of seconds and observe the way you breathe. Is my breath shallow? Is my stomach relaxed? Am I using the full capacity of my lungs?

Observing your breath for a while will lead you to a great discovery: how you breathe is how you feel. It even influences the thoughts you have. Remember when we spoke about the different planes of our existence influencing each other? Your breath shapes what kind of thoughts you have throughout the day and how confident you feel.

QWow, I’ve never thought about it that way. I’ve already noticed that I breathe more shallowly when I’m anxious or stressed, but I never thought I could reverse the way I feel by breathing differently. I’m starting to see why the breath is such a powerful tool.

AYes. As we discussed, your breath is one of the fastest ways to influence your whole system at once. It’s what I call an “access point” to your state of being.

But here’s what matters most: if you’re unaware of your anxious breathing patterns, it will be almost impossible to make positive changes in your life, because your body keeps receiving the message “we are in danger”, and survival becomes the number one priority. So if you’re struggling to change something in your life, start by changing the way you breathe.

QOK, I get it. The breath is my remote control. It lets me change the way I feel and act, and it even influences my outlook on the world.

AYes, that’s it. So now... take a big breath in.