Breathing… what’s the big deal?

Breathing… What’s the big deal?

I have a seven-year-old daughter who, when she gets upset or worked up and is struggling to bring herself back to calm, I sometimes try to get her to take deep breaths. Her response is almost always, “No, Mommy, I don’t want to breathe!”

And I get it. First of all, I’m her mom and so in those moments, she often just doesn’t want solutions from me. No problem. That’s when we bring out the singing bowl – I’ll talk more about that in another post.

But what her young mind is not quite ready to understand is that learning how to direct her breath in a conscious way is a calming and healing treatment that we can give ourselves at any time, upset or otherwise. Your breath has a profound effect on your cells, your heart, your brain, and on your overall energy. We communicate with our bodies and our emotions through our breath in every moment, with every thought, emotion and experience.

You’ve undoubtedly heard people refer to breath as shallow or deep. We are often guided to take deep “belly breaths” in meditation and yoga classes. If intentional breathing is your thing, then that might make sense to you. If not, it might sound a little weird or it might just not resonate with your personal lingo.

However, we all know that without breath, we have no life. Oxygen uses breath as a vehicle to get into our system and it fuels literally everything we do and are.

For example, our hearts, of course, receive the oxygen and pump it into our blood, allowing our limbs and organs to function. Easy to understand, right? We all learned that from a young age.

What we maybe haven’t learned yet, is that our breath communicates our circumstances to our brain. 

What?

Our senses perceive what’s happening in our environment and to our bodies. If there is danger, our senses take in the information and send it to our brains. Our brains then decide how we need our bodies to respond to the danger. This essentially puts us into our fight/flight/freeze response, which usually includes cuing our breath to speed up.

So, our body (senses) communicate to the brain and the brain communicates back to the body (fight/flight/freeze response). 

Now, here’s the cool part. We can train ourselves and our breath to communicate safety and calm to our brains, thereby allowing us to gain a sense of clarity rather than panic. When we feel clearer, we can respond to circumstances more effectively, and we can regulate our emotions more easily. This can be extremely effective in dealing with anxiety when there is no actual danger in our physical environment. Based on my experience as a counsellor, I know that statistics-wise there’s a decent chance that you experience a degree of anxiety on a regular basis. So, honing your ability to gain control of your breathing and thereby redirect your energy toward clarity may be a very effective tool for you to explore.

Breathing isn’t just about staying alive. It’s about how you experience feeling alive. It’s your own personal superpower.