The way you breathe — whether fast or slow, shallow or deep — is intricately tied to your body as a whole, sending messages that affect your mood, your stress levels and even your immune system. Yet, breathing is unique in that it’s both easily ignored (becoming a basic background of your life) and revered at the same time. In the latter case, it’s almost instinctual to advise someone to “take a deep breath” if they’re feeling anxious, stressed or fearful.
While it’s long been known that breathing is connected to your brain (and vice versa), it wasn’t until early 2017 that researchers discovered breathing may directly affect your brain activity, including your state of arousal and higher-order brain function.1 Breathing is initiated by a cluster of neurons in your brainstem. In an animal study, researchers were attempting to identify different types of neurons (out of a group of nearly 3,000) and identify their role in breathing function.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to research highlighting breathing’s many effects on your mind. Respiration has traditionally been looked at in terms of automatic brain stem processes, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that higher brain mechanisms are also involved, although the link is not very well understood.
“Therapeutic techniques have used conscious control and awareness of breathing for millennia with little understanding of the mechanisms underlying their efficacy,” researchers wrote in the Journal of Neurophysiology.
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