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Breathing Lessons
By Carol Krucoff
Special to The
Washington Post
Think you know how to breathe? Try this simple
test: Sit or stand wherever
you are and take a deep breath. Then let it out.
What expanded more as you
inhaled, your chest or your belly?
If the answer is your chest, you're a "chest
breather," and like most people
you're doing it all wrong. You may also be putting
your health in jeopardy. For more information, take
another deep breath-and keep reading. The technique
is so powerful that physician James Gordon teaches
it to nearly every patient he sees, from people
with advanced cancer to those crippled by arthritis
to school children struggling with attention deficit
disorder. He's taught it to war refugees in Kosovo,
to anxiety-plagued medical students at Georgetown
University and to hundreds of health professionals
who have attended his workshops on mind-body-spirit
medicine. emerging field of mind-body medicine say
few people in Western society know how to breathe
correctly. Taught to suck in our guts and puff out
our chests, we're bombarded with a constant barrage
of stress, which causes muscles to tense and respiration
rate to increase. As a result, we've become a nation
of shallow "chest breathers," who primarily
use the middle and upper portions of the
lungs. Few people-other than musicians, singers
and some athletes-are even
aware that the abdomen should expand during inhalation
to provide the
optimum amount of oxygen needed to nourish all the
cells in the body.
"Look around your office, and you'll see so
little movement in people's
bellies that it's a wonder they're actually alive,"
Gordon says. "Then watch
a baby breathe and you'll see the belly go up and
down, deep and slow." With
age, most people shift from this healthy abdominal
breathing to shallow chest
breathing, he says. This strains the lungs, which
must move faster to ensure
adequate oxygen flow, and taxes the heart, which
is forced to speed up to
provide enough blood for oxygen transport. The result
is a vicious cycle,
where stress prompts shallow breathing, which in
turn creates more stress.
"The simplest and most powerful technique
for protecting your health is
breathing," asserts Andrew Weil, director of
the Program in Integrative
Medicine and clinical professor of internal medicine
at the University of
Arizona in Tucson. Weil teaches "breathwork"
to all his patients. "I have
seen breath control alone achieve remarkable results:
lowering blood pressure,
ending heart arrhythmias, improving long-standing
patterns of poor digestion,
increasing blood circulation throughout the body,
decreasing anxiety and
allowing people to get off addictive anti-anxiety
drugs, and improving sleep
and energy cycles."
Unlike any other bodily function, he notes, "breathing
is the only one you
cando either completely consciously or unconsciously.
It's controlled by two
different sets of nerves and muscles, voluntary
and involuntary. And it's the
only function through which the conscious mind can
influence the involuntary,
or autonomic, nervous system."
"Western medical education at the moment doesn't
include information of this
kind," says Weil. "In the four years I
spent at Harvard Medical School and a
year of internship in San Francisco, I learned nothing
of the healing power
of breath. I learned about the anatomy of the respiratory
system, and I learned
about diseases of the respiratory tract. But I learned
nothing about breath
as the connection between the conscious and unconscious
mind, or as the doorway to control of the autonomic
nervous system, or about using breathwork as a technique
to control anxiety and regulate mental states, or
the possibility
that breath represents the movement of spirit in
the body and that breathwork
can be a primary means of raising spiritual awareness."
Eastern healing techniques often prescribe conscious
breathing to help
restore health to people who are overly stressed.
"In Japan, a diagnosis of
autonomic nervous system imbalance is common, but
in the medicine of the West we don'thave this diagnosis,"
he says. "Western medicine typically tries
to blunt
the over-activity of the sympathetic nervous system
or deal with its
consequences at a more superficial level by giving
drugs to suppress or control it." In contrast,
relaxation breathing works to increase parasympathetic
tone,
slowing down the heart rate and decreasing blood
pressure, bringing the two systems into balance.
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