And...BREATHE!

Breathe, breathe in the air 
Don't be afraid to care 
Leave but don't leave me 
Look around, choose your own ground 
For long you live and high you fly 
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry 
And all your touch and all you see 
Is all your life will ever be 

Breathe – Pink Floyd 
 
​
Nowadays it’s fashionable to breathe. 

It never used to be. You just did it. All was banal.  But then people used to drink water from the tap, or draw it out of a well.  Instead we now consume it by the gallon (litre) in plastic bottles manufactured god knows where. And supposedly containing some pure spring water from France or high in some distant magical land where the air is fresh, the water clear, the animals frolic in a Pixar like haven of serenity.... 

We’ll believe (or subscribe to, and pay for) anything these days. 

Having said that there is nothing new under the sun as they say. It was in fact always fashionable to breathe. If you belonged to a certain enlightened class. Or social set. Or partied with the Maharishi and were part of the rock star or celebrity firmament. 

Yoga. Qi gong. Meditative practices, Zen or otherwise. Systems that were pre-packaged in an earlier age. Ritualised and followed with zeal.  The promise of Samsara.  Or Nirvana. Or just peace amidst chaos. 

Now it’s Wim Hof and the new marketing era is upon us. It’s fast becoming the trend to breathe once again. A different guru. One that wears his achievements on his sleeve, claims to have the Academy beating down his door to establish credibility and reveal hitherto misapprehended mechanisms of the human physique (and mind).  Breathing is more than fashionable; it's becoming a way of life.   

Have we really lost touch with how to breathe? Or did in fact we not know how to do so in the first place? Perhaps it’s as much a testament to the fast paced, hypertense time in which we are living.  Threats have retreated from the forest shadows to be replaced with the anxiety of an always-on cultural sensibility.  Where too much choice, or the disparaging glances of a narcissistic society impress a more insidious stress upon us: a constant effort to maintain a façade, keep up with the zeitgeist of opinion, gossip, alignment to causes, dispositions, and the proliferation self-branding that keeps all the social media plates spinning all the time. 

Breathing the new way (or is it the old?) is about centering oneself. Re-establishing control over one’s hyperactive physiognomy as it remains electrified with all this pallaver in the world.  Deeper, more fulsome inspirations.  Languorous, controlled expirations.  Slowing the system down.  Re-connecting homeostatically with the parasympathetic system (Jerath et al, 2006). 

This is at core about attention.  

How and where one focuses attention ultimately governs one’s control over self, one’s response (reactive or, optimally, proactive) to the environment.  To allow ourselves to be at the behest of environment, and reactive homeostasis (internal environment or bodily state) is to invite stress and entropy (towards chaos) into our personal space.  Like a badly inflated balloon that increasingly bows to the ambient pressure outside (or a plastic bottle sinking ever deeper into the ocean), we will soon collapse inward, unable to balance our demeanour relative to our surroundings, helpless, subsumed.  But if we can expand our own internal pressure, if not to resist so much as balance, establish equilibrium with the outside forces, then we are in a better place, asserting our own rightful position in the scheme of things.  With a little practice and a little extra impetus, exertion, our inner pressure, can more than compensate for the outer, and propel us more assertively into the world to transport ourselves where we deign necessary. And to leave our mark as active agents. 

From this perspective we might then see breathing as indeed that expression of a capacity to stamp our mark on our environment.  Far better to be buoyant and capable of drifting on the wind than being subject to crushing gravitational forces that perpetually squash any capacity to move.  

Evidence suggests (Jerath et al, 2006) that slowing the breath, taking it in more deeply, can help downregulate the sympathetic nervous system that normally prepares the individual for action, response (‘flight or fight’), and instead brings to bear the Parasympathetic Nervous System. This component of the Autonomic Nervous System is responsible for maintaining bodily functions when the individual is at rest, sustaining basic functions pertaining to feeding, digesting. These are the vital functions that can get on with keeping the organism operating properly (and optimally). We need to counterbalance a proclivity to be hyper stimulated, overactive in Sympathetic activation. Otherwise we are in danger of burn out due to stress, manic responsivity and preparedness to act constantly to keep attuned to a chaotic environment.  Even on the Savannah, prey must find down time to rest and recuperate.  As with the predator.  

How we breathe has ramifications for our cognition.  It is no coincidence, from this standpoint, that systematized practices with ancient origins reveal cognitive benefits when subject to more in-depth (scientific) scrutiny.  Meditation is good for you! At the heart of meditative and mindful pratices the world over, is a strong tradition of focus on observing one’s breathing, and seeking to relax and breathe more slowly and deeply (as is won’t to be the case with relaxation anyway, including the aforementioned down regulation of SNS and instantiation of PNS activity).  Restricting breathing can have marked impeding effects on cognition (Paulus et al., 2012), unsurprisingly. Attention is disrupted and alerted to a homeostatic change that will accompany circumstances that prompt a shift in respiratory patterns (Heck et al., 2017; Paulus et al., 2012).  This invokes interoceptive signalling.  

The insular cortex is involved in the regulation of homeostasis (Craig, 2002; Craig, 2009; Strigo and Craig, 2017; Hannapour et al., 2018), including processing the attentional salience of information pertaining to bodily state awareness in response to environmental changes. Ultimately, this leads to the formation of emotional responses based upon this information.  The sensation (interoceptive awareness) of perceived pain is also modulated by respiration, including reduced perceived intensity with slow, deep breathing, and with inspiration – breathing in (Heck et al., 2017). My own Master’s thesis (Gallagher,1995) concerned attentional focus on a particular form of (Tibetan) meditative chanting, key in which is the proper expression of a mantra, or phrase done in conjunction with diaphragmatic breathing on the exhalation, intoned with a resonant sound.  As with singing.  The central proposition of my research was how this attentional focus, and it’s bearing on how the brain galvanises executive control processes, can mitigate against response to homeostatic signals of an interoceptive and noxious nature. In short, pain.  Cold stressor pain, this being a proxy for environmental cold stress. One observation, aside from an increased capacity to tolerate the cold stressor when accompanied with this attentional focus on a meditative technique, was that the decision to withdraw from the test (the time course to such a decision being the dependent variable metric) would occur at the renewal point in the cycle of breaths - i.e at the termination of an iteration of chanting coinciding with the end of the exhalation... 

So if you want to improve your cognition, and enhance your health, both physical and mental, you need to breathe.  There are techniques available to assist you in doing this correctly, including devices that you can employ to provide the right feedback to this progress.  There is a revolution afoot, and at our disposal are many sources of inspiration.  Although we mustn’t neglect the expiration! Indeed, a line of thinking proposes that a key to increased cardiovascular fitness and which benefits the whole mind-body collective, relates to CO2 tolerance (https://powerspeedendurance.com/experiments-art-breath/).  A test of one’s capacity to tolerate build up of CO2 involves nasal breathing and a long controlled exhalation (through the nose, as we should only ‘blow out’ CO2 via the mouth when ‘hanging out’ as it were during intense exercise) for as long as can be managed. ‘Normal’ is in the range of 20-40 seconds, and ‘elite’ might be seen above 80 seconds.  Interestingly, when I tried this, and having always felt prone to inefficient breathing patterns marked by irregular and tense characteristics, I expected to perform poorly.  My first attempt came in at around 68 seconds, and moments later (though you aren’t meant to repeat this), I managed 87 seconds! This is why it is important to gain objective measures of one’s behaviour – we seldom exhibit in our self-perception the characteristics that manifest to others!  

Forget what you ‘know’.  Find objectivity in your quest to improve and optimise yourself.  Breathing is a means to centre your ‘self’. It is a direct route into your homeostatic functions that you can access and direct.  It can restore balance (‘sympathovagally’) and set you on course to focus your mind, intention, attention.  Consequently, this is the route towards achieving goals, performing at your best, and being in tune with the environment.   

Inhale, sigh and let all it all out, repeat. 


References 

Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 3, 655–666. doi: 10.1038/nrn894 

Craig, A.D. (2009). How do you feel — now? The anterior insula and human awareness. Nature REviews Neuroscience. 10, 59-70 

Gallagher, D (1995). Cognitive-Induced Analgesia: Attentional Processes and Meditative Chanting. MSc thesis, Lancaster University. 

Hassanpour, M.S., Simmons, W.K., Feinstein, J.S., Luo, Q., Lapidus, R.C., Bodurka, J., Paulus, M.P., and Khalsa, S.S. (2018), The Insular Cortex Dynamically Maps Changes in Cardiorespiratory Interoception.  Neuropsychopharmacology, 43, 426–434 

Heck, D. H., McAfee, S. S., Liu, Y., Babajani-Feremi, A., Rezaie, R., Freeman, W. J., Wheless, J. W., Papanicolaou, A. C., Ruszinkó, M., Sokolov, Y., & Kozma, R. (2017). Breathing as a Fundamental Rhythm of Brain Function. Frontiers in neural circuits, 10, 115. https://doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2016.00115 

Jerath, R., Edry, J.W., Barnes, V.A. and Jerath, V. (2006). Physiology of long pranayamic breathing: Neural respiratory elements may provide a mechanism that explains how slow deep breathing shifts the autonomic nervous system. Medical Hypotheses Volume 67, Issue 3, , Pages 566-571 

Paulus, M.P., Flagan, T., Simmons, A.N., Gillis, K., Kotturi, S., Thom, N., Johnson, D.C., Van Orden, K.F., Davenport, P.W. and Swain, J.L. (2012). Subjecting Elite Athletes to Inspiratory Breathing Load Reveals Behavioral and Neural Signatures of Optimal Performers in Extreme Environments.  Plos One, 7, 1-11 

Strigo I.A., and Craig A.D. (2016). Interoception, homeostatic emotions and sympathovagal balance.Phil. Trans. R. Soc.B371: 20160010.