The Healing Power of the Breath: Simple Techniques to Reduce Stress and Anxiety, Enhance Concentration, and Balance Your Emotions
by Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg
Here’s a drug-free, side-effect free solution to common stress and mood problems—developed by two physicians. Millions of Americans suffer from mood problems and stress-related issues including anxiety, depression, insomnia, and trauma-induced emotions and behaviors; and most would prefer not to take medication for their conditions due to troublesome side effects, withdrawal symptoms, and disappointing success rates.
Drs. Richard P. Brown and Patricia L. Gerbarg provide a drug-free alternative that works through a range of simple breathing techniques drawn from yoga, Buddhist meditation, the Chinese practice of qigong, Orthodox Christian monks, and other sources. These methods have been scientifically shown to be effective in alleviating specific stress and mood challenges such as anxiety, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and many others. The authors explain how breathing practices activate communication pathways between the mind and the body, positively impacting the brain and calming the stress response. The enclosed audio program guides readers through the techniques and helps make these breathing practices an ongoing part of daily life.
This book and CD set includes breathing techniques to relieve
• anxiety and depression
• trauma-related emotions and behaviors
• post-traumatic stress disorder
• addiction-related behaviors
It also offers breathing techniques to enhance concentration, peak performance, and personal relationships.
The Sweetest Spot: Coherent Breathing and the Body Scan
"Can you focus your life-breath until you become supple as a newborn child?"
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Babies are remarkably flexible. They can put a toe in their mouth almost as easily as a thumb. Not only their joints, but many other parts of their bodies are more elastic than those of adults. As we age, we become less elastic, more rigid, both physically and mentally. The walls of the blood vessels of a baby are far more elastic than those of an adult who may develop “hardening of the arteries” in old age. The responsiveness of a baby’s nervous system is also more flexible. It is this flexibility that enables infants and children to respond and adapt more rapidly to a greater range of environmental changes. When a person is highly adaptable, their system undergoes less wear and tear during the challenges and stresses of everyday life. Stress resilience is the capacity to recover and rebound from challenging events. Everyone has the capacity to increase their stress resilience. We just need to turn up the healing, recharging parts of the nervous system and tone down the overreactive part of the system. Breath practices enable us to fine-tune the stress response systems quickly whenever needed.
When an individual experiences more stress than their system can handle, particularly repeated or prolonged stress, there will be adverse effects on their emotional and physical health. Initially the person may just feel some tension, excess worry, and some difficulty falling asleep. This can progress to actual anxiety, obsessive worry, insomnia, daytime fatigue, irritability, and muscle aches. During this time, the stress-response system is doing its best to cope, possibly by releasing more cortisol, more adrenaline, more excitatory neurotransmitters, all of which burns more energy, releases more free radicals, and increases inflammation. However, if this goes on too long, the stress-response system may become exhausted, leading to a state of depression, chronic fatigue, overreactivity, feelings of being overwhelmed or helpless, and the progression of physical illnesses such as cardiovascular disease. It is possible to prevent or even reverse this progression by increasing the strength, balance, and resilience of the stress response system.
Coherent Breathing and Heart Rate Variability
In order to cultivate stress resilience, we begin with belly breathing and Coherent Breathing, techniques that shift the stress-response system into a healthier balance by activating the healing, recharging part of the nervous system while quieting the defensive, energy-burning parts. After you learn Coherent Breathing, we will teach you a relaxation practice that will also produce a noticeable increase in the flexibility of your cardiovascular system. The healing effects of Coherent Breathing are accelerated by the addition of techniques such as Resistance Breathing and Breath Moving. Most people are just too busy to spend hours on mind-body practices. We have combined three breath practices into one technique, which we call Total Breath, to maximize the impact and minimize the length of practice time.
The healing, calming part of the nervous system is the parasympathetic nervous system. The level of activity of this system can be measured using the natural fluctuations in heart rate that are linked to breathing; these fluctuations are used to calculate heart rate variability, or HRV. Changing the rate and pattern of breathing alters HRV, reflecting shifts in nervous system activity. We know this not only from scientific studies but also from trying it ourselves and observing its effects in our patients and students. You can do a simple test of this on yourself. Sit comfortably and place two fingers on your pulse, either on the side of your neck or on your wrist, whichever is easier. Now breathe slowly and deeply. Continue the slow deep breathing as you count your pulse. Count the number of beats when you breathe in, and compare it with the number of beats when you breathe out. What do you notice? If you found that your heart beats faster when you breathe in than when you breathe out, you are correct. You have discovered that every breath you take affects your heart rate. Heart rate variability not only responds to breathing in and breathing out, it also changes with the overall rate of breathing. For example, breathing slowly increases HRV. Is that good? Since changes in HRV are mediated through the autonomic nervous system, when the HRV is higher it means that the system adjusting the heart rate as you breathe in and out is responding more robustly and more flexibly to changes in breathing. When HRV is low, it means that either something is impaired or the system is aging and becoming more rigid. So the answer is yes, increasing HRV is very good, because having a higher HRV is associated with a healthier, more flexible cardiovascular system, a more balanced and resilient stress-response system, and overall greater health and longevity. In fact, scientists use HRV as a means of measuring the balance of the stress response system and a balanced stress response means less wear and tear on the body. People with anxiety disorders, depression, post-traumatic stress, attention deficit disorder, excess aggression, cardiovascular disease, and irritable bowel syndrome have reduced HRV and dysfunctions in their stress response systems. After you learn Coherent Breathing, we will teach you a relaxation practice that will also demonstrate the increased flexibility of your cardiovascular system.
Coherent Breathing is a simple way to increase heart-rate variability and balance the stress-response systems. When scientists tested people at all possible breathing rates, they found that there is an ideal breath rate for each person, somewhere between three and a half and six breaths per minute for adults using equal time for breathing in and breathing out, a sweet spot where the HRV is maximized and the electrical rhythms of the heart, lungs, and brain become synchronized. Modern researchers have called this the resonant rate, but this phenomenon has been known for centuries by religious adepts in many cultures. For example, when Zen Buddhist monks enter deep meditation, called zazen, they breathe at six breaths per minute. The Italian cardiologist Luciano Bernardi discovered that traditional chanting of the Latin Hail Mary occurs at six breaths per minute. In chapter 7 you will learn more about Bernardi’s fascinating studies, in which resonant breathing enhanced high-altitude performance.
Coherent Breathing is breathing at a rate of five breaths per minute, around the middle of the resonant breathing rate range. Tracks 8 and 10 on The Healing Power of the Breath CD that accompanies this book will pace your breathing with a chime tone at five and six breaths per minute, respectively. We use these rates because they maximize HRV for most people. Breathing at a rate that is close to one’s ideal resonant rate can induce up to a tenfold improvement in HRV. For people who are over six feet tall, the ideal resonant rate is three to three and a half breaths per minute. For children under the age of ten, comfortable rates range between six and ten breaths per minute. Although most adolescents and adults can learn to breathe at five breaths per minute easily, some people have more difficulty due to physical issues such as asthma or obstructive lung disease. High levels of body tension can also impede attempts to slow down the breath. To make it easier for those who need more time to adjust to slow breathing, The Healing Power of the Breath CD provides track 10 to pace breathing at six breaths per minute.
There are many ways to learn Coherent Breathing, including a growing array of commercial gadgets with visual cues. But we prefer a method that is relaxing and easy to use anytime, anywhere. Research shows that keeping the eyes closed and the hands still has significant effects on brain waves, indicating greater relaxing effects. When people look at a computer screen, move their eyes, or type on a keyboard, this activity can interfere with the attainment of optimal states of relaxation. This is one of the reasons why we use breathing. It can be done with eyes closed and hands at rest.
In learning breath practices the most important thing to remember is to relax. That may sound obvious, but it isn’t. As you are learning a new practice it may feel awkward or unnatural at first. You may begin to worry about whether you are doing it correctly, whether it is working, whether you need to try harder. All this thinking and worrying will just make you tense up. Self-judgment adds another layer of stress. The less you judge yourself, the easier it will be to relax and experience the benefits of Coherent Breathing. As you read this book, simply follow the instructions as best you can, give yourself time to get the hang of it, and sooner than you imagine, it will all go smoothly. Try not to evaluate or judge what is happening. Just go with it.
Published by Shambala
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