Beyond In, Out, Repeat

Last week, I spent six hours at a workshop on breathing.  You’d think I would have known how to do it before the workshop, since I’m not dead yet.  However, breathing does have finer points.

On one level, it is absolutely simple.  Our autonomic systems take care of it without any input from our conscious mind.  This is by design, so we can do things like worry about whether there is milk in the fridge or consider how wormholes work without keeling over.  We would never get anything done if we had to remember to breathe and make our hearts beat and our glands secrete and our hair grow.

However, as people have noticed throughout time, we can also exert some conscious control over our breathing.  This can do everything from facilitate movement to soothe nerves to energize our thinking.  How we choose to control the breathing affects what we get out of it.

There were a bunch of technical details that I get to apply in my work, but one item was of interest in the wider sense, I think.  Because the purpose of breathing is gas exchange (oxygen in, carbon dioxide out), when we focus on lengthening the inhale, we are energizing our bodies and we are calming ourselves when we lengthen the exhale.  In practical terms, in these stressful times, we need to exhale more if we are anxious and inhale more if we are depressed.  (This goes some way to explain why aerobic exercise is so useful for those of us with depression issues:  we have to inhale a lot more when we do it!)

The best news of all is that no matter how we are breathing, we are simultaneously training our core muscles.  It is the longest set of core exercises ever—a whole lifetime’s worth!