EVIDENCE BASED

PRACTICING CONSCIOUS BREATHING IS GOOD FOR YOU.

A person typically takes between 17,000 and 30,000 breaths per day, every day. Bring your attention to this normal occurrence for a few minutes daily for health benefits, documented by growing research evidence. And, pausing for a 2-minute breathing break is a great way to enjoy a quick refresher in the midst of a hectic day, especially if it’s a work from home day.

Let’s begin with a few definitions:

Conscious breathing or ‘breath awareness’ practices simply means that you pay attention to your breath. You make no effort to control or change it.

‘Coherent breathing’ is an exercise where you consciously lengthen your breath and make your inhale and exhale (known as one breath cycle) approximately the same length. It’s also referred to as paced breathing.

‘Controlled breathing’ exercises, also known as pranayama among yoga practitioners, involve varying the lengths of inhalations and exhalations by specific counts and may also include breath holding in between inhales and exhales.

Conscious breathing is easiest as it only requires observing the breath. It’s a valuable practice, particularly if you’re interested in meditation, since it’s an important meditation skill. It provides the following additional benefits:

1. Focus or concentrate attention. With the ever-present challenge of digital distraction, improving our skill of attention—the ability to focus on a single subject—is important. Research shows that in the past 15 years, the average adult attention span has decreased from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, literally less than that of a goldfish! The breath is always with us and provides an easily accessible focal point for attention.

2. Cultivate present-moment or mindful awareness. When you pay attention to the breath, you’re noticing what is happening in the moment. This helps you develop your skill of mindfulness, in other words, present-moment awareness. Our breath is alive. Observing the breath, immediately connects you to your living present moment experience. Increasing mindfulness is linked with many benefits including less stress and better life quality.

3. Enable conscious access to the nervous system. For a quick review, our autonomic nervous system regulates physical processes that keep us alive. In other words, your heart beats, you breathe, your food is digested, automatically, when you’re healthy. Breathing is one aspect of the nervous system that you can also consciously control by regulating your inhalation and exhalation. [In contrast, for example, it’s very difficult to consciously affect your digestion, no matter how hard you think about it!] Often, when you observe the breath, it will slow down and create feelings of calm. A long, slow breath is characteristic of the ‘rest and digest’ phase of the nervous system, that is in contrast to the ‘fight or flight’ phase.

4. Enhance your mind-body connection. Your mind and body are intertwined. However, many of us often ‘live in our thoughts’. This can lead to loss of a sense of connection with the body. For example, many lose sensitivity to more subtle sensations of fatigue, sleepiness or thirst. Or, people mask these natural feelings with caffeine. When you practice noticing the breath and bodily movements with inhalation and exhalation, it awakens your awareness to more subtle physical sensations and improves overall body awareness. Preliminary research suggests that body awareness helps with emotion regulation. Better emotion regulation means fewer emotional highs and lows, more overall feelings of calm.

You can see from review of these benefits that taking a few minutes out of each day to practice observing the breath is worthwhile. You can increase mindfulness, enhance calm feelings, improve emotional stability and strengthen your ability to focus your attention. Check here for links to SoundCloud, iTunes or Spotify podcasts for breath awareness exercises between 2 to 15 minutes in length.

You can also listen to my podcast below.

Click here to listen to my podcast on Apple Podcasts.

For full playlist of Breathe Awareness Meditation, check the playlist below.

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