Ready? Notice your stress level and rate it on a 0-10 scale (if it’s a 0, this experience will be purely for entertainment). Now pay attention to your inhale. Actually count how long it takes you to inhale, without particularly changing what you were doing when you caught yourself off-guard:). Now make your exhale two counts longer, without pushing or forcing, simply exhaling longer than usual. If that’s easy, try three or even four counts longer on the exhale, keeping the inhale count the same. Continue that rhythm of inhale and exhale for up to a minute – or longer if you like.
Now give yourself several seconds of simply allowing the breath to move of its own accord. You may notice that there is a pause at the end of the exhale, and that if you don’t meddle with that pause, a new inhale emerges out of it without your needing to do anything at all.
Now once again rate your stress level. Repeat this several times throughout the first day, rating your stress level before and after. If you find benefit, make this practice your friend! Put little sticky notes in your home, office, car, or have your favorite digital device give you a friendly reminder. Little bitty input with huge effects!
If you find yourself out of breath or unable to lengthen your exhale, you are likely doing what’s called “reverse breathing” – pulling the breath up into the upper lungs instead of letting the diaphragm drop on the inhale. it’s time for a private session or two to get your diaphragm reflexively doing what it may not have done for a very long time! See the Contact page.
You can stop reading there if you like, or if you’d like to know Why this works, read on for a brief summary. When we slow down the exhale, we increase the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) relative to oxygen (O2) in the body. We can think of CO2 as a primary regulator of ph and overall systemic balance (the need for a much greater respect for CO2 will have to wait for another blog). Most of us breathe shallowly, depriving ourselves of sufficient CO2. Long exhales also stimulate the Vagus nerve (rVNS) to facilitate parasympathetic nervous system activity (think rest and digest) and tend to get the diaphragm moving more optimally. Those long exhales directly improve both our autonomic function and our ability to think.
For further reading, here’s a 2019 article in Psychology Today by Christopher Bergland that goes into some detail about the effects of long exhales (and other practices) on the nervous system, with studies cited at the end of the article:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201905/longer-exhalations-are-easy-way-hack-your-vagus-nerve
Finally, our breathing spans both the conscious and unconscious realms. It’s great that we are able to consciously change our unconscious breathing habits and thereby so powerfully affect our health, hopefully transforming harmful habits to beneficial ones. But this very act of manipulating breath can in itself be a problem; many people find it difficult to be breath-aware without being a breath-meddler! The unconscious movement of the breath, when attended to with attention as light as a butterfly’s wing, yields a wealth of well-being that no amount of manipulation can.
Most breathing instruction focuses on the inhale, the exhale, or both, as though that is all there is. Yet if we attend with that butterfly presence, we find a pause at the end of the exhale that makes itself known only where the manipulation ceases. The pause, for me, is a deep quiet lake of Presence, of organic rearrangement, a where that is nowhere, out of which springs the fiery spark of the inhale, the demand for life. But only when we stop our meddling! For this reason, I see great value in following the beneficial manipulations of breath with a bit of being-with, allowing integration and a new balance.
The content above does not constitute medical advice. All exercise, therapy, diet, supplement and health practices should be cleared through your health/medical professional.
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