“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” - Marcus Aurelius
You probably hate Zoom meetings by now. In fact, if you work in an office setting, you’re probably just tired of meetings in general. But every now and then, you have a truly important meeting. You prepare, rehearse, read, dress nice, and do everything you can to show up ready.
Physiologically, we step into one of these “truly important meetings” approximately 25,000 times per day…no big deal, I know :) And we can choose how well we prepare for each one. We can send messages of calm, focus, and relaxation, or messages of anxiety, stress, and arousal.
Whichever we choose, the messages we send with our breathing regulate many aspects of our health and well-being.
How? Well, the answer to that is complex because breathing interacts with many systems of the body simultaneously (as we learned last week). But, the paper I am sharing this week goes through two significant regulatory effects of breathing.
Modulatory Effects of Respiration
Published in Autonomic Neuroscience: Basic and Clinical (2001)
The two main takeaways from this study are:
(1) Breathing modulates the cardiovascular system through respiratory sinus arrhythmia
(2) Specific breathing patterns can reduce our chemosensitivity to carbon dioxide and hypoxia
1. Breathing and the Cardiovascular System
Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) measures how breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure all interact. Put simply, RSA is the increase in your heart rate as you inhale and the decrease in your heart rate as you exhale. RSA is thought to be an index of vagal activity and direct measurement of heart rate variability.
When we breathe so that the length of our inhale matches our heart rate increase and our exhale matches our heart rate decrease, we maximize RSA. Typically, this occurs when breathing at around 6 breaths per minute. This coherence among breathing and heart rate maximizes heart rate variability and improves cardiovascular efficiency.
2. Breathing and Chemoreflexes
They reviewed a study conducted with yoga trainees and non-yoga trained participants. This study assessed how different breathing protocols affect sensitivity to high carbon dioxide (hypercapnia) and low oxygen (hypoxia). These sensitivities are known as chemoreflexes.
As we might expect, the chemoreflexes of the yoga practitioners at baseline were much lower than the non-trained participants. This means their breathing did not increase as much when exposed to hypercapnia or hypoxia.
Interestingly, when breathing at 6 breaths per minute, the controls' chemoreflexes decreased to levels similar to the yogis. Therefore, the simple act of slow breathing reduced chemosensitivity to carbon dioxide and hypoxia, regardless of previous training.
Being able to tolerate changes to carbon dioxide and oxygen easily is a sign of respiratory and physical resiliency. And merely slowing down your breathing can improve this resiliency almost immediately.
How Will Your Next Meeting Go?
Breathing is fascinating because it’s both autonomic and under our control. Obviously, we can’t control every breath we take, and I think that would be an awful way to live. But, we can deliberately set aside time to harness what we’ve learned from this study.
Just a few minutes of slow breathing at around 6 breaths per minute can improve chemosensitivity and align your cardiovascular and respiratory systems. This will help make the other 25,000 odd breaths you take that much more effective.
Here’s to being the regulator of our health and well-being.
In good breath,
Nick
James Nestor Q&A
James Nestor is holding a “Breathing Q&A,” where he is rounding up questions related to all aspects of breathing to sending them to be answered by experts in the field of respiratory science. I have a few to submit…you should too!
Yoga & Breathing Virtual Workshop
My wife is teaching a masterclass on breathing and yoga as part of a larger Virtual Yoga Festival. She’s mixing in slow breathing, CO2 tolerance, Oxygen Advantage, and The Art of Breath. I don’t “advertise” in my newsletter, but the studio hosting the event is donating all of the profits to No Kid Hungry. So if you’re into yoga and/or breathing, you can learn and support a good cause at the same time.