By in Meditation, Mindfulness, Other Therapies, Yoga & Pilates

How Should I Breathe?

“How should I breathe?” is a question that comes up very often in my movement work and other therapeutic conversations.

Throughout the 11 years of my professional practice, I have been taught many differing opinions on the subject and I will admit that I have changed my answer to the question of how we should breathe consequently several times. So if practitioners, like myself, keep changing their tune, is it any wonder that there is so much confusion about breathing? 

Here is the funny thing about breathing: we do it, no matter whether we pay attention to it or not. What’s more, we do it well! Breathing is about keeping us alive and we are alive right now, so “Good Job”, I say! 

I am stating the obvious here because I know that many of us beat ourselves up about the way we breathe. We get told that we breathe shallowly, or that we don’t breathe enough, or wrong in some way or other. It is very easy to get insecure about ourselves when someone, or we ourselves, believe to identify a problem, a weakness, or something that is not ideal inside of ourselves. 

Perhaps it helps to understand that the way we breathe is not really under our conscious control. Our breathing patterns are dictated by our autonomic nervous system. It is called autonomic because it really is autonomic, -or automatic. We just breathe, whether we think of it or not, which of course is great! Imagine we had to remember to breathe all the time. 

So how we breathe is managed by this automatic process inside of us. But we also can take over control of our breath. While our breath automatically changes when we are climbing stairs, for example, we can also simply choose to hold or deepen our breath when we want to. 

This is a great power we have, as it can help us use our breath in order to calm or energise our nervous system. This is why there are so many meditation practices that include breathing exercises. It can be very powerful to reverse the autonomic processes in our body. While the autonomic nervous system mostly sends messages to our breath so to speak, we can also make our breath send messages back to our nervous system. 

The issue for me is that we, as human beings, have a tendency to take over our logical brains. You know what I mean. It is that habit in us that we have developed over hundreds of years, to decide to go to work even though we are exhausted or to pop pills to take away the pain, rather than actually attend to the root cause. We tend to do the same with our breath. 

There is nothing wrong with using tools such, as deep diaphragmatic breathing, in order to help us calm down. But what I am seeing is that the promotion of particular breathing practices, causes many people to believe that that is THE way to breathe and that we should be doing it all the time.

It seems to me that we are simplifying a complex mechanism and meddling a little too much with our very finely-tuned bodies. 

What I am observing in my practice quite often is that people have at some point been told, for whatever reason, to breathe into their low abdomen more. Perhaps at the time, there was a very good reason for this, but by the time they come to me what I find is an often excessive and imbalanced breathing pattern that creates tension and lacks full inhale capacity. 

What people do not often get told is that the abdominal part of the breath cycle only supplies around 25% of oxygen to the body. The remaining 75% comes from the expansion of the ribcage. So when we constantly overemphasise the deep abdominal part of breathing we may feel that we are calmer but we also are reducing our oxygen intake and creating tension in our ribcage and shoulders, which may cause other issues over time.

What we need to remember when we discover the power of a particular breathing practice is that it is a specific tool for a specific purpose. It is not “how I should breathe” all the time. 

The other issue with our keen executive functioning, when it comes to breathing, is that we often dismiss our natural way of breathing as faulty or wrong before we have understood its purpose and value. 

Sometimes people find that changing the way they breathe is very triggering and does not feel good. This is not at all surprising, because our nervous system chooses how we breathe and it is never random about it. Our natural breathing pattern is a response of our nervous system to the world around us. So when we change our breath this can literally upset the nervous system and put it into a state of stress. This either may cause emotional turmoil and discomfort or it simply makes our breathing pattern revert back to what it was doing before we managed to change it. 

Somatic Experiencing has taught me that nothing the nervous system does is random and that it can be incredibly valuable to be curious about what we naturally find in our body before we decide that something else would be better. 

Let me give you my own example:

Earlier this year I underwent some specific breathing-oriented training with one of my Somatic Experiencing trainers, an American/Brazilian somatic practitioner called Lael Keen. I was asked to observe my breath along certain parameters. I realised that I do hold my breath at times and that I also spend a surprising amount of time not breathing at all. I observed myself exhaling and then…. nothing happened for a rather long time. 

Exploring this further I realised that this “not breathing” related to a deep need to hide. Rather than simply choosing to breathe more I explored what it was like to not breathe. I discovered a stillness and sense of being invisible. It felt both safe and also rather numb, as though I was only minimally alive.

Experimenting with my breathing I realised that it sometimes feels really good to choose to breathe more. It felt like I was giving myself permission to be alive, to take up space, and to engage with the world around me. I was aware that this was something I had already done a lot of therapeutic work around and hence I was relatively comfortable with the sudden sense of exposure and life energy as I choose to breathe more. 

I also knew that during childhood I often felt the need to hide and not be seen, because I was bullied. Minimal breathing is my safety blanket when I feel overwhelmed, vulnerable, or too exposed. It is an important strategy for my nervous system, regardless of how I judge it from my conscious mind. No breathing practice will take away this deeply rooted survival strategy and I am glad that my nervous system was able to come up with something that could make me feel safer back then. This is not something to criticise or change. It is something to appreciate. 

That does not mean, however, that I may not use my breath sometimes to support a different state in me when that feels right. And thanks to all the other therapeutic work I have been undertaking it feels safe more and more often. Nowadays I may often want to be seen and I may want to engage with the world. So I can now use my breath to help me do so, knowing that when I need to hide my breath can also help me do that.  

So back to the question “How should I breathe?”. I am not sure I can answer that question nowadays, because to me breathing is a very subjective and individual thing. There is, of course, something to be said about breathing efficiency and an ideal, balanced anatomical process. But that is anatomy. We are so much more than the sum of our parts. So how you should breathe really depends on you, the situation you are in, and what you can negotiate with your nervous system.

Kristin Loeer
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