By Anya Brand – Breathwork Instructor/Yoga Teacher
Understanding anxiety and breath, is the first step towards getting anxiety under control. But, what is anxiety? We all know the feeling. You’re about to sit down for a job interview, an exam or go on a date and your heart races. Your adrenaline surges, your breathing becomes rapid and shallow. You feel a sense of dread. For some of us, anxiety is a rare experience and can be directly attributable to a stressful situation. For others, anxiety is a regular and persistent visitor. Although it’s a natural emotion that we will all experience at some time, for many of us it doesn’t feel good, and for one in four Australians, it will become a debilitating disorder.
With anxiety on the rise, many of us are looking for techniques that are natural, safe, easy and effective. In this article we will explore the mechanics of anxiety and discover how breathing better can empower us to hit ‘reset’ and help break the stress-anxiety cycle.
Research shows us that breathing exercises are an effective way to down-regulate our response to stress. They are easy to learn and you don’t need any special equipment to practice. Once you become aware of the way you breathe, you can start breathing better right away, and experience benefits within minutes.
Breathing better has cumulative benefits; it will positively affect every system of your body – from posture to sleep, and digestion to feeling sexy (or calm). You can practice anywhere and anytime; all you need is your breath, which is always with you. Rather than feeling breathless, in the worst possible way, read on and learn how your breath can become a lifelong ally.
Many of us have experienced unprecedented levels of distress and uncertainty in our lives over the past two and a half years. An international study led by researchers from the University of Queensland estimated anxiety disorders grew by more than 25 percent worldwide in 2020. Anxiety and breath are closely correlated.
In August of 2021, mental health crisis lines received record numbers of calls from Australians needing support. In its busiest day ever, Lifeline received 3,345 calls, a rise of over 220 per cent. Anxiety now affects twice as many Australian women as it does men, with one in three women affected, and one in five men.
The World Health Organisation named anxiety and depression the biggest epidemic of the 21st century. Yet, their latest Mental Health Atlas showed that in 2020, governments worldwide spent on average just over 2% of their health budgets on mental health. Many low-income countries reported having fewer than 1 mental health worker per 100, 000 people.
This highlights our need to be self-aware, and better equipped to maintain our mental wellbeing. So how can we manage our stress and anxiety, and increase our resilience? To borrow an adage – “knowledge is power”. The first step is understanding what is happening when we feel stressed or anxious.
By understanding our physiology, and the anxiety-stress-response cycle, we can better understand that so much of the power in what we can do to heal lies with our breath.
When it arises, anxiety is a very physical experience. We feel it in our bodies, and as such it can really limit the way we show up in the world. In short bursts it can be useful and serve to motivate us. This can be handy if we need to stop procrastinating to study for an exam, be focused to compete in a sporting event, or wide awake and alert to perform in front of an audience.
Long term, however, it can feed into chronic stress. This affects every system in the body and has serious consequences for our health and wellbeing. These include inflammation, hypertension, chronic fatigue, auto-immune conditions, nervous system dysregulation, sexual dysfunction, digestive disorders, insomnia, infertility, and immune dysfunction. Anxiety affects the way our brain works and can cause brain fog, making simple tasks difficult. It makes it hard to come up with whole brain responses to problems and situations. It can also cause us to lose our ability to respond rationally to stressful situations.
The first thing to understand is that anxiety in and of itself is not a bad thing. It’s a natural human emotion. Part of a protective stress response and survival mechanism that humans and animals share alike. Historically, it’s been an extremely useful response and has played an important role in our survival as a species.
Our cavemen ancestors had to be alert to all kinds of physical danger, including weather events and predators. One of the functions of anxiety and breath is to help us to see physical threats in our environment and prepare for them. Although we are far removed from the lives of our cave-dwelling ancestors, our brain’s watchman, called the amygdala, is still very relevant. The amygdala is responsible for initiating our survival response. It has remained relatively unchanged since it first evolved some 200 million years ago. We share this with all our mammalian ancestors as well as all modern-day reptiles. This is why it is referred to as the reptilian or primitive part of the brain.
Although we are far less likely to face the same physical dangers as our ancestors, our bodies are still hardwired to react the same way to perceived threats. That is, threats both real and imagined. For most of us living in western civilisation, today’s triggers are more likely to be situational stressors than physical dangers.
This becomes problematic when our primitive brain responds to everyday stressors like being cut off in traffic, an argument with our colleague or spouse, or a work deadline as though they are life-threatening.
Humans are also endowed with a negativity bias; it’s what makes us assume a stick is a snake, rather than simply a stick. It also influences our perception of daily events, interactions and relationships. In an evolutionary sense, those with the strongest negativity bias were the ones who survived to become our ancestors. The others got bitten by snakes which they assumed to be sticks.
When already in a state of chronic stress, this bias can lead to catastrophising – looking for worst case scenarios. Added to that, we have also unfortunately been endowed with what I call a “Reverse Superpower”. This the power of being able to manifest the stress response through the power of thought alone. It’s easy to see how stress and depression have reached epidemic proportions over the past couple of years.
The stress response, more commonly known as fight-flight-freeze, is activated through the sympathetic nervous system. There are the two branches of the autonomic (think automatic) nervous system. It alerts us to danger often before we see it with our eyes. It is designed to motivate us to act until we are out of danger. Also, it is designed to switch back off whilst the parasympathetic nervous system, the other branch of the autonomic nervous system. The PNS takes centre stage by helping to calm and relax us all the way back to balance.
Our parasympathetic nervous system, more commonly known as the rest-and-digest response or relaxation response, is designed to become dominant once we are safe. During the relaxation response, the body moves toward a state of physiological relaxation, where blood pressure, heart rate, digestive functioning, and hormonal levels return to normal levels.
In the animal kingdom, an analogy for the natural flow between fight-flight and rest-digest is that of a springbok being chased by a lion. The springbok races and jumps. With great agility and speed it moves to evade the lion, and once in safety shakes itself off (to release the stress). The heart and breath rate spike to catch up. Then it returns to eating grass with the herd within minutes, as though nothing has happened. Anxiety and breath go back to normal.
Humans are different to springbok and other mammals, because we can stay in fight-flight-freeze response 24/7.
“Our stress response can stay activated without ever switching off, which means that it’s possible to stay in a stress-anxiety-loop 24/7, unable to ever really relax and unwind.”
It’s likely that we all know someone like this and may have experienced periods of it ourselves. Current data tells us that 25% of humans worldwide now have disregulated nervous systems. Nervous systems that have become dysfunctional and that have lost the ability to unwind. It’s not only exhausting, but it’s dangerous for our health.
One stressor followed by another, followed by yet another, means we do not get to down-regulate after each trigger. The natural dampening of the stress response does not occur as there is simply not enough time and space between stressors. We are meant to spend most of our life in a parasympathetic state, in rest-and-digest, not in fight-flight-freeze. Are familiar with the feeling of being tired-but-wired and exhausted yet unable to switch off, unwind or sleep? If so, it’s an indication that your sympathetic nervous system has become dominant.
To understand what is happening in our bodies when we feel this way, we need to look at the oldest part of the brain, the limbic system. Deep within the limbic system, is a part of the brain so ancient in origin that it is referred to as ‘reptilian’. The amygdala are two almond shaped clusters of cells that are responsible for emotions such as fear and anger . The amygdala function as the brain’s watchman. It interprets images and sounds. When it perceives danger, it instantly sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus then communicates with your autonomic nervous system and begins the release of stress hormones. These hormones are adrenaline and cortisol. They are responsible for the physiological changes associated with fright, panic, and anxiety; such as racing heart, quickening breath, sweating, and surging energy.
These changes happen so quickly that people aren’t aware of them. In fact, the wiring is so efficient that the amygdala and hypothalamus start this cascade even before the brain’s visual centres have had a chance to fully process what is happening. It’s what causes you to jump out of the path of an oncoming car even before you think about what you are doing. Also, we have all heard the stories of incredible feats of superhuman strength in emergency situations. Like the mother who lifts a car to rescue her trapped child.
Experienced long term, rather than acutely and followed by complete recovery as nature intended SNS activation has a detrimental effect on our health and wellbeing. It negatively affects every part of the body. Our immune, digestive and reproductive systems remain shut down; our heart and lungs are forced to work harder which feeds into a cycle of over-breathing. We experience an elevated heart rate; increase in blood pressure; increase in blood sugar levels; increased muscular tension. Stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol are constantly released into our system. They can make it difficult or impossible to sleep, let alone think straight. Through prioritising survival above all else, the body stops sending energy to systems not required to deal with the perceived threat. And all of these systems suffer the consequences.
We all breathe, it’s central to life. But how many of us actually pay any attention to our breath? Are you breathing through your nose, or mouth? Do you know if you breathing into your chest or belly? Are you breathing deeply or shallow? Were you aware of how you are breathing before I posed this question? If I asked you whether you are a nose breather or a mouth breather would you know the answer, and further to that, would you really care?
We take on average 20,000 breaths every day. Yet, we are mostly unaware of how the way we are breathing is directly affecting our responses to life – and how these responses show up in our bodies, moment to moment, breath by breath.
It’s already clear that stress and anxiety affect the body. It makes our breath shorter, faster and shallower. But did you know that even if you were not feeling anxious (and were in a state of complete calm) and then took a series of short, fast and shallow breaths, that your breathing pattern would relay signals of agitation to your brain? This would be telling your brain that you are not safe. On a very primal level, shorter, faster, shallower breathing creates a loop as it signals to the body to activate the SNS. Thereby further increasing SNS. tress and anxiety levels. A large part of this picture has to do with carbon dioxide tolerance.
You probably already know that we breathe in to obtain oxygen and we breathe out to expel carbon dioxide. The body naturally maintains optimal levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide. This balance is in part maintained through how fast and how deeply we breathe. When we exercise, for example, we breathe faster and more deeply. We do this in order to replace the oxygen being used and expel the extra carbon dioxide produced by metabolic changes.
During anxiety our breathing rate increases without any physical exertion. We breathe out too much carbon dioxide. If the body cannot quickly return carbon dioxide levels to the optimal range, we experience further symptoms. Poor breathing and prolonged stress and anxiety can lead to over-breathing. This is a situation where we breathe harder because we do not get enough oxygen. This perpetuates the stress response through fast, shallow breathing.
A great question to ask then is: “Can we reverse engineer this response by making our breathing longer, deeper and more conscious? And can we become more resilient to stress by improving our tolerance to carbon dioxide?”. The answer to both questions is yes. Read more about the breathing techniques that will increase your resilience in my next article here.
We have centuries of anecdotal evidence that advanced Tibetan yogis and meditators gained control over the automatic functions of their body. Functions such as breathing, digestion, immune function, temperature. Even so, for a long time, modern science refused to believe that the autonomic nervous system could be voluntarily influenced.
Milarepa, known as Tibet’s greatest yogi, was said to have lived in subzero temperatures between 1052-1135 CE. He lived in a remote cave in the Himalayas. He lived in a remote cave in the Himalayas, wearing only a loincloth, eating only nettles. It is said he and regulating his bodily temperature and other systems through breath control and meditation. More recently, a monk in Thailand appeared to perform a feat of autonomic bodily control. He did so through meditation, chanting and breath control. However, it was not until Wim Hof became the subject of a study in 2012 for his breath and cold exposure work, that it was scientifically proven that it is possible to control the autonomic nervous system through meditation and breathing practices.
The nervous system is much like the brain when we talk about neuroplasticity. It is also considered to be plastic (able to be rewired/reshaped) and science shows us that it can be easily retrained with simple mindfulness practises like breathwork.
By breathing diaphragmatically and consciously slowing your breathing down, you can activate your parasympathetic nervous system and relaxation response. This lets your body know that you are not in danger and it’s safe to relax. In turn, this will allow your body’s systems to reset. As we know, when the parasympathetic nervous system becomes dominant, your body can start recovering, healing and repairing itself, focusing on digestion, immune function and relaxation.
By re-training the breath to restore the natural flow of breathing, and by nose breathing, we can increase our resilience to carbon dioxide. This will result in a greater uptake of oxygen in the cells, and a correction of the tendency to over-breathe. Furthermore, this will result in breathing better and more efficiently…and effectively breathing less. The benefits of breathing better are cumulative. Breathing better can be a game-changer for both physical and mental health and resilience. When we build resilience, we are able to cope with more stress, and the parameters of what is manageable in our lives can start to broaden.
We dive into breathwork techniques and practices in depth in the next article. 6 Simple Breathwork Exercises to Combat Anxiety and Build Resilience. Check out the step-by-step guidance to bring more balance, calm and relaxation into your body and into your life.
Try this technique to relieve anxiety and start your Journey to Calmness Through Slow Breathing
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