The Psychobiology of the Breath

As far back as we can trace in history, humans have always associated breath with life and spirit. The Latin words animus (spirit) and anima (soul) are related to the Greek animos (wind), and the Greek word pneuma (as in pneumatic or pneumonia, or the French word for a car’s inflatable tire, pneumatique) also meant spirit or wind. Our ancestors associated the breath with the soul or spirit or life force that “animates” all living beings.

On a strictly biological level, breath is the source of life. It maintains the body’s strength and vitality by enabling gas exchange between oxygen and carbon dioxide at a cellular level. The overall health and well-being of our bodies and minds are influenced by how we breathe.

The breath is an autonomic body function, meaning it happens automatically whether we think about it or not—on average, 15 times per minute, 900 times per hour, and 21,000 times per day. But breath is the only autonomic body function that is also subject to voluntary control; you can hold your breath at will, or breathe consciously in any number of ways. Thus, breath is a unique bridge between body and mind, between our outer and inner worlds. Through breathing, we literally take substances from the outside world into the body, and we eliminate other substances back into the outside world.

Metabolically, breathing facilitates the accumulation and elimination of certain chemicals. For this reason, heart rate and breathing are intimately linked. As our body senses the need for more oxygen, the heart rate increases, sending oxygenated blood where it’s needed, and the breathing rate increases in proportion to support the heart. When fear strikes in a dangerous situation, the body responds by ramping up these systems quickly with a spike of adrenaline and stress hormones that facilitate fast reactions.

Our breath conditions our psychological and emotional state, and vice versa. How we breathe shapes our experience, and our emotional temperament shapes how we breathe. The rate, depth and quality of our breath change in response to our emotional and psychological outlook. Thus we can develop dysfunctional patterns of breathing as a result of psychological, habitual ways of responding to situations and stresses in our lives.

In the most simplistic terms, we have two major types of breathing: abdominal and thoracic. Abdominal breathing (aka belly breathing) is when the diaphragm deeply contracts and we appear to “breathe” into the lower belly because the viscera of the abdomen (the guts and internal organs) are pushed downward and bulge out slightly. Thoracic breathing is when we breathe into the chest cavity, using the accessory muscles of breathing to expand the rib cage. In yoga, the practice of full yogic breathing involves both of these actions.

It’s important to understand the difference between abdominal and thoracic breathing because the body and mind initiate these two basic breathing patterns—and respond to them—differently. Thoracic breathing is often more shallow and rapid, and can include a forced exhalation in order to trigger the next inhalation sooner. Thoracic breathing is activated when the body is exercising or under duress and blood needs to be oxygenated and circulated more quickly. It is associated with the sympathetic nervous system and the “fight or flight” response.

Abdominal or belly breathing tends to be more slow and deep and relaxed. When the body is at rest, abdominal breathing is generally considered the most healthy breathing pattern. Abdominal breathing is associated with the parasympathetic nervous system which governs relaxation and the “rest and digest” response.

Both types of breathing are necessary for different situations in life. Sometimes we need to activate quickly, move and respond to the environment, and our cardiovascular activity needs to be proportional; other times, we need to chill out, relax and slow down, and the body’s systems need to support that relaxation.

Problems can arise when we don’t understand how to work skillfully with the breath, and breathing becomes a conditioned behavior that is shaped by our emotional states, stress levels, and so on. For example, we may have a pattern of breathing more thoracically—taking in shallow, rapid breaths into the upper chest—even when we are at rest. This breathing pattern, in turn, keeps our sympathetic nervous system activated, which continually releases stress hormones that help the body prepare for “fight or flight” syndrome even when “fight or flight” is not an appropriate response to what’s happening in our environment.

Developing a deeper understanding of the psychobiology of breathing—how breathing influences mind and body, and how mind and body influence breathing—is essential for any human being who wants to live with a greater sense of health and well-being. For the yogi who practices with the goal of spiritual awakening, breath is the inspiration, the guide and the raw material for the practices of yoga and meditation.

Stop Trying So Hard

In meditation, as in life, some of the simplest lessons are also, paradoxically, the most challenging to learn. The most basic principles can be easily understood in theory but may take the longest time to be metabolized and understood in practice.

Striking the balance between effort and effortlessness is a good example. Perhaps you’ve heard about the Buddha’s famous meditation advice to one of his disciples: like the strings of an instrument, he said, you should fine-tune your meditation in a way that’s “not too tight and not too loose.” Finding that elusive balance between trying too hard and not trying hard enough — between concentrating the mind too intensely and not concentrating at all — sounds simple in theory. But it can take years of practice — falling back and forth from one extreme to the other — to really metabolize this lesson and understand what that balance actually feels like.

Image from DharmaConsulting.com

I recall some vivid glimpses of this when I was first starting out on my path of meditation.

At that time I was attending a meditation center that offered a series of weekend intensive courses in which participants would basically sit and meditate (interspersed with lectures, walking meditation, and other activities) Friday night, all day Saturday, and all day Sunday. That's a pretty hardcore immersion into meditation, especially for a beginner. A lot can happen when you sit on a cushion for eight hours and do nothing but work with your own mind.

What mostly happened for me was a lot of struggle as I sat there waging battle with my overactive mind for hours at a stretch, feeling frustrated that I couldn’t seem to keep my attention focused on the object of meditation for very long. My frustration would grow stronger as the day went on and I tried harder and harder to conquer my restless mind and wrestle it into submission. I wasn’t really aware, of course, that I was trying too hard.

But then one day I noticed something really curious happening. I left the meditation center and got on the subway to go home, my mind exhausted from hours of self-inflicted battle. I was disgusted with meditation, disgusted with myself, and I didn’t want to think about anything — I just wanted to rest. On the subway ride home I sat there and looked around at the people in the car and at the advertisements festooned above them, and — boom! — suddenly, without any effort on my part, I was vividly present and relaxed and aware. The colors around me seemed brighter, the sounds more precise, my mind more open and spacious, no longer bombarded by thoughts and commentary about everything. Right there in the subway, of all places, I was experiencing a spontaneous moment of the sort of pure presence that I’d been trying so hard, all day long, and without much success, to cultivate on the meditation cushion. And it came to me, unbidden, because I had simply given up and stopped trying so hard to create it.

A lot can happen when you sit on a cushion for eight hours and do nothing but work with your own mind.

Over the course of several of those weekend intensive trainings, this experience repeated itself several more times, until the lesson finally began to sink in. Naturally, if you don’t make any effort to train the mind, you don’t experience the benefits of mind-training; but if your practice isn’t balanced and you’re always trying too hard, then your effort is self-defeating, like tying your shoelaces together.

As the Buddha said, “not too tight, not too loose.” Makes sense, right? At least in theory…. ;-)

Fast forward about a decade-and-a-half. These days, my personal meditation practice is largely about effortlessness — about trying (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) to rest the mind in a natural state of awareness that is free from effort, free from manipulation, free from contrivance. This is called the natural state because it’s how the mind already exists when we stop trying so hard to control our experience.

When I first began meditating, I used to sit on my mind like a sumo wrestler who wants to squash his opponent, always trying too hard. These days, I’m more prone to the opposite extreme, not trying hard enough. As I seek to allow the mind’s natural state to emerge into awareness and simply stop interfering with it, my tendency sometimes is to become too loose, to space out and drift away.

But that’s the thing about tuning the strings of an instrument, be it a violin, a banjo, or the mind. You might be able to tune them perfectly for the music you’re playing right now, but then the next time you play the same instrument, you’ll need to tune them again. Strings don’t magically stay tuned forever just because you tuned them perfectly once. Every meditation, and every moment, is a fresh experience.

I guess that’s why they call it practice.


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