Health and Wellbeing - The Benefits of Breathing

We take for granted that we breath in and out without giving it a second thought. A normal range is 17,000 – 22,000 breaths per day. Concentrating on our breathing in a deliberate manner can have incredible benefits like relaxation, clearing your mind, increasing attentional focus and performance during exercise. A simple method to begin your deliberate practice is Box Breathing or Square breathing. This method is centred around equal inhale: hold: exhale: hold patterns e.g. 4:4:4:4. In simple terms we will:

Inhale: Through your nose for a count of 4 seconds. Think about filling your stomach and sides with your breath and not just your chest.

Hold: Your breath for a count of 4 seconds.

Exhale: Through your nose for a count of 4 seconds. Try to exhale smoothly.

Hold: Your breath for a count of 4 seconds.

Then repeat the process. Start off with completing 5 breath cycles.
You can do this multiple times per day and slowly build up the number of cycles you complete.

If you like the Box Breathing method to increase relaxation and clear your mind, you can also manipulate your breathing for other benefits. Stanford neurobiologist Andrew Huberman has extensively studied the power of our breath.

“When you inhale, the diaphragm moves down, and the heart gets a little bigger because it has more space. Blood flows a little more slowly through the heart under that condition. So the heart then signals to the brain, and the brain says, “Oh, we’d better speed up the heart.” So if you want to increase your heart rate, you inhale more than you exhale. The opposite is also true. Every time you exhale, you’re slowing down the heart rate.”

Try these inhale: hold: exhale: hold patterns if you are:

Feeling tired: 6: 1: X exhale as quickly: 2 x 10 cycles

Feeling anxious: 6: 2: 10: 1 x 5 cycles

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