We all know that all parts and functions of our body are connected, and the impact other people and the world have on our bodies.

Many disciplines place a very high value on the power of mindful breathing, and all of us have experienced the powerful sense of physical and mental refreshment and calming when we take a deep breath.

A set of studies on how nerves and brains and bodies work around the issue of breathing have brought to light incredibly interesting insights into the whole system.

Breathing- Some Basics

Rhythm is a feature of many functions of our body.

The most familiar is the heartbeat, which is as rhythmic as anything we can imagine.  The steady beat of the heart provides a background beat that is present every moment we live.  That beat can slow or quicken as we calm and as we get excited, as we spike a fever or have a fever resolve, as we get dehydrated or get rehydrated.  Some can slow or speed up their heart beat at will, but for most of us, the pulse is what it is, with little influence from us consciously.

Another, even more obvious rhythm, that we don’t think of as a rhythm is walking.   I actually think it’s more from walking than our heartbeat that we connect to one of the core powers of music, the beat.  Walking, more than the heart beat, has an upbeat and downbeat corresponding to our feet hitting the ground or lifting up off it.  Walking, far more than pulse, can go fast of slow, steady or jerky.  Walking truly reflects very visibly all the particularities of our personality, and how we connect to ourselves, each other, and the world.

There are literally billions of cellular rhythms inside the chemistry and electricity of the body.  Many of them accumulate to give us a daily rhythm of night and day.  But these rhythms are hard to be aware of and very hard to alter.

Then comes the rhythm of breathing.  Like the heart beat, this is an internal rhythm of the body we are aware of and reflects a vital function, in this case getting our oxygen to our body and clearing out the carbon dioxide.  The incoming oxygen is delivered to the body by the beating heart, and the same pulsing blood flow delivers the waste carbon dioxide to the lungs for removal with breathing out.

Perhaps not as well known is the fact that we do not breathe evenly every moment.  Most people think of breathing as a very steady sequence of events- we take a breath in, then breathe out.  One is as deep as the other, and we do this many times a minute, very much like our pulse beats many times a minute, all the time.  But the reality is that if we are at rest, reading, watching TV, not talking, our chests move very little and every minute or two we take a deep breath in and out.  That deep breath is called a sigh.

If you attached a belt to your chest that could detect chest movements, you would see the tracing show a very shallow increase and decrease in chest width, very shallow and slow oscillations of breath, with the deep sigh every minute or two.

Of course, if an alarm of danger is set off, or if we exercise, our breath gets much deeper, and faster, and we can feel the breathing much more readily.

The Power of Breathing

We walk, we have our pulse, we breathe, and countless other rhythms take place without our awareness within our cells, but as noted above, there are many disciplines that focus very deeply on the power of breathing to alter our mood, improve our focus, increase our sense of potential and power.

Is this all simply the power of suggestion?  When 15 people are in a yoga class together and the instructor asks everyone to focus very intently on taking in a breath, and everyone around you later talks about how powerful an experience this was, do you feel it was powerful via peer pressure, or is there something measurable going on?

It turns out that science has looked at how animals and how we breathe, and there is quite a bit happening.

Recent findings were summarized in an article in the Times in April of 2017-

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/well/move/what-chill-mice-can-teach-us-about-keeping-calm.html

The first finding talked about is that there are a surprisingly small number of nerve cells in our brain that manage all the complex work of making us breathe.  The human brain has about 100 billion nerve cells in its outer shell, the cortex.  The total number of nerves that run breathing appear to be about 3,000, that’s it.  Readers of these postings may recall that recent research on how we respond so passionately to our babies’ crying found the response required 17,000 nerve cells.  Incredible that all the complexity of breathing can be managed entirely by such a tiny number of nerves.

The second finding is even more extraordinary.  By various tagging and function analysis techniques they found that in the clump of 3,000 nerve cells that manage breathing, there are at least 65 different types of nerve cells, each of which have adifferent function in controlling how we breathe.  I have trouble thinking of 65 different variables to breathing or styles of breathing, but there it is, there is true complexity in how we breathe.

The third finding has to do with what happens if you disable this or that type of nerve cell in charge of breathing.  One set of cells, when disabled, left the mouse no longer doing those deep breaths, sighs, every minute of so.  The sighing simply stopped happening.  When another set of cells was disabled, they sighed just fine, but when danger normally would set off an alarm, they sat calmly with no jump in breathing rate.

Now here is where it gets really exciting.  When they looked at this last set of breathing nerve cells (that when disabled left the animal unable to breathe as if alarmed), they were able to trace connections to the part of the brain that sounds the general alarm, and that in turn makes your heart race, get worried, and get very alert.

Here is direct proof that how you breathe directly changes how your brain considers the level of threat in the world, how worried you are, how quickly your pulse beats, your level of calm.  Your pulse does this too, but it is more difficult to change on demand.  But breathing can be changed, and the sense that it profoundly changes your place in the world is very real.

BOTTOM LINES

1. It is not just our imagination that makes good breathing a truly profound experience.
2. Neuroscience has discovered a tiny group of just 3000 neurons, out of the 100 billion neurons in the brain that run the great complexity of breathing.
3. These 3000 neurons contain nerve cells that serve as many as 65 different controls on breathing.
4. Breathing is one of many, many rhythms in the body, but is a basic, life sustaining rhythm that we can have tremendous impact on with our conscious minds.
5. Patterns of breathing help define how anxious, or alarmed our mind is, how rapidly our heart races, our level of energy, and overall outlook on the world.
6. Mindful breathing is powerful, and worth thinking about.

To your health,
Dr. Arthur Lavin