by Claire Maisonneuve

Inhale deeply, hold and exhale.
Although proper breathing is so fundamental and transformative, its power to improve health is often completely overlooked by most mental health professionals. It is something that’s available to us immediately, costs no money, requires no prescriptions, no needles, has no side effects and always keeps us in control. It only requires a few minutes per day.
Considering that breathing is something we do all the time, an estimated 22,000 breaths a day, it seems worth exploring the power and impact this function has on our health and well being.
Proper breathing, in my experience, is unquestionably one of the most simple, ancient and effective strategies used to improve our lives and alleviate stress or anxiety.
When we suffer from ongoing stress and anxiety, we experience something called disordered breathing, also called upper chest breathing. Disordered breathing means that we are breathing too fast, too shallow and too high in the chest. Generally, it keeps the body tense, the heart working faster than it needs to and makes it impossible to experience a sense of complete deep relaxation.
Disordered breathing is generally maintained by negative thought patterns that include thoughts of worry, nervousness and fear, such as “What if I can’t make it? what if I fail? what if something bad happens? what if I get hurt? what if I lose someone?” as well as “I should have, I could have, I must” or “I shouldn’t have said that, I should know this by now, I could have done a better job, I must never embarrass myself.”
These thoughts create feelings of fear, guilt or despair that in turn causes muscle tension. This includes restriction of the diaphragm, the main muscle used in proper breathing. Disordered breathing patterns in turn sustain our thoughts of worry, fear and nervousness. It’s a vicious cycle and it must be interrupted through our own conscious effort. One of the most powerful techniques to break this cycle is to change our breathing patterns because our breath is ultimately linked with our minds. Think about how you breathe when you suddenly become anxious, fearful or angry. The very first thing that changes when our thoughts and emotions change is our breathing patterns.
In addition, breathing is a function that is both voluntary and involuntary, or conscious and unconscious. If we don’t think about it, we’ll breathe anyway. When we focus on it we can influence its rhythm.
You can test your own breathing by looking in the mirror. As you take your deepest and most powerful breath in, watch if your whole upper chest and torso move up. See if your shoulders lift significantly on the inhalation and drop on exhalation. Notice if the abdominal area or belly contract as the chest rises on the inhalation. If this happens, then you have witnessed upper chest breathing.
This is a sure contributor to high levels of stress and anxiety.
When this type of upper chest breathing happens, we struggle to take a deep breath in, and when we do, it never feels fully satisfying. You can also test the speed of your breathing by counting how many breaths per minute you take.
At 10-12 breaths per minute you are breathing in a healthy and relaxed manner, 12-16 breaths are still within the norm while over 16 breaths means that the body is in a state of hyper vigilance and hyper alertness. Taking 16 breaths or more per minute intensifies and sustains levels of stress and anxiety and will, over time, tax the immune system.
Disordered breathing is also responsible for much of the tension we experience. The problem is that when we breathe from the upper chest we are using what’s called the secondary respiratory muscles, which are located around the shoulders, neck, jaw and face. These muscles are delicate and should only be used in case of sudden threat because they tire more easily than the primary respiratory muscles that include the diaphragm and abdominal muscles.
The diaphragm, which is a sheet-like muscle that lies horizontally in the body, is the main or primary muscle we should be using when we breathe. It sits just below the lungs and heart and separates the chest from the abdomen.
When we breathe properly there is an obvious and powerful movement of the rib cage. In disordered breathing we use the secondary respiratory muscles far more often than we should. The result is tension in the neck, jaw, face and shoulders, often followed by headaches and other neuro-muscular problems. By changing our breathing patterns alone, we can experience significant and dramatic relief from this tension.
When this pattern of fast, shallow breathing, high in the chest, is maintained over long periods of time, it leads to what’s known as hyperventilation which means moving more air in and out of the chest than the body can handle. If we can’t breathe in fully, then we can’t breathe out fully. So we try breathing more quickly to make up the lack of oxygen.
Hyperventilation is what anxious and stressed-out people do lots of, and this in turn affects all major systems of the body, neurological, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular. That’s why people with stress and anxiety frequently suffer from rapid heart beat, chest pains, tingling, prickling or numbing sensations, dizziness, lightheadedness poor concentration, sleep disturbances, physical and mental restlessness, bowel problems or frequent sighing.
Of course we don’t go to our doctors complaining of our breathing or saying we are hyperventilating. We only see our breathing difficulties as a symptom of something else.
Because the powerful effects of our breathing are overlooked, we may be sent to various specialists, such as internists, neurologists and cardiologists. Frequently it results in a lack of abnormal findings. We may be prescribed tranquilizers, anti-depressants, anti anxiety or sleeping pills. Yet no one is paying attention to the impact of breathing.
Rapid, upper chest breathing is a normal response to sudden threat. It’s one of the reactions of the fight or flight response, which is an instinctive, adaptive internal response to danger. So the first response to sudden stress is a change in our breathing patterns. But when we suffer from long-standing anxiety and stress, this rapid breathing or hyperventilation becomes a stable, ongoing feature. We are breathing as if we were in imminent danger, expecting something bad to happen at any moment or the other shoe to fall. This keeps us in what’s called a constant state of hyper-alertness, hyper-arousal or hyper-vigilance.
The breath is an important indicator of what’s happening in our thoughts and feelings, and it can have very real and distressing effects on the body. But consider this: If the breath is so powerful it can produce this range of negative symptoms, then surely it can also produce positive experiences in our minds and bodies. And if feelings are so connected to breathing, then it seems logical to conclude that if we learn to control our breathing then we can learn to control anxious and stressful states of mind. This is why it’s so important to make contact with our breathing pattern to influence our well being.
When I first tell people that I’ll teach them about breathing they’re not usually impressed because after all they’ve been doing it their whole lives. Yet, most of my clients will agree that this is one of the most useful, constructive and healing practices they’ve learned in therapy. Because much of therapy is about trying to activate and stimulate the resources, strengths and abilities we have within us, the process of proper breathing is about re-stimulating inherently healthy breathing patterns that we had when we were first born.
Through awareness we can begin to remove the obstacles to proper breathing, and through practise we can rediscover and reactivate our natural capacities to breathe in ways that are satisfying and conducive to well being. The good news is that good breathing is never lost; it’s only forgotten because of negative habits. Just like our capacity for peace, joy and happiness inside us is never lost, it’s only unexplored or undeveloped. Through awareness and practise we can recover our ability to breathe fully and healthily.
My experience with people has convinced me beyond a doubt that to relieve anxiety and stress we must influence our breathing. By working with very simple methods to change our breathing patterns we can become centred, grounded and calm within. We develop our capacity to experience more positive energy that in turn gives a sense of vitality and pleasure in the body. The potential to feel vibrant and energized yet calm is not something we can get from a pill. It’s something we must cultivate, using discipline and the power of awareness.
It is amazing how we are taught so much about the world, politics, geography, other people and the cosmos, yet so little about what’s going on inside us, how to develop the powers of our mind as well as the ability to be calm and trust our bodies. Considering that these attributes ultimately carry us through life and determine the quality of our existence it seems reasonable to spend some time learning to cultivate them. One of the first steps in doing so is the concrete experience of working with breath. Freedom from stress can be just a few breaths away.
Once again, inhale deeply, hold, exhale fully and relax.

Claire Maisonneuve is a registered clinical counsellor and director of the Anxiety and Stress Relief Clinic in Vancouver 604 732-3930. Her CD on proper breathing for health will soon be released www.anxietyandstressrelief.com