Breath and The Nervous System
Here is a truth you cannot avoid: The way you breathe influences how you respond to stress.
Whether you are conscious of it or not, your breathing affects how you perceive and react to the world around you. As such, deepening your relationship to your breath provides you with a powerful tool for understanding and managing your responses to stress.
Many functions of the body are regulated by the autonomic nervous system, including breathing, heartbeat, and digestive processes. For the most part, these processes are not consciously directed. To understand how the breath and the nervous system are related, it is useful to think of the state of the autonomic nervous system as a continuum that runs from parasympathetic (PNS) to sympathetic (SNS). The PNS is often referred to as our "rest and digest" state. When our autonomic nervous system moves more toward the PNS our heart rate slows, heart rate variability increases, our vision becomes broader, our fine motor skills improve, our digestive system begins to process nutrients, and our bodies engage in repair and recovery processes. We are able to take in and synthesize new information (learn) and form new social connections (connect). The SNS is often called our "fight or flight" state. As our autonomic nervous system shifts more toward the SNS, we move into survival mode. Heart rate increases, vision narrows, fine motor skill decreases, and we become much more narrowly focused. As we move into the SNS we tend to operate more from instinct than from reasoned consideration.
The way you breathe is constantly communicating to your autonomic nervous system about whether to shift more toward the PNS or the SNS. When you are not conscious of your breathing, your default responses to stress - some of them very ancient - will tend to take over the nervous system and send you into an up-regulated survival mode SNS response that very few circumstances in modern life actually require. . . unless of course you are actually attempting to outrun a grizzly bear.
Thankfully, being chased by a grizzly bear is not something we often encounter. Most of the stressful moments in your day are not life-or-death circumstances requiring you to be in survival mode. But your nervous system does not know this. The nervous system interprets many of the experiences of modern life as survival moments and tells the body to react accordingly because it does not understand context. Instead, the nervous system understands the inputs it receives - including the way you are breathing. Most of the time, your autonomic nervous system regulates your breathing without your conscious awareness of it. However, as a human you have an ability unique in the animal world - the ability to consciously control your breath. And, because you can consciously control your breath, you can use the breath to directly influence the state of your nervous system.
Mindful breathing is a practice that you can develop into a powerful tool for self-regulation. The power of this practice becomes more evident when you combine an understanding of the effects of breathing on the autonomic nervous system with awareness of and sensitivity to the contextual demands of life. Does this moment require a shift toward the PNS or the SNS? Is this a moment for instinctual reaction or a moment for reflective response? The practice of mindful breathing allows us to choose.
