Breathing: Optimal Breathing Under Stress

[Explor­ing Life] What makes you hold your breath? describes the impor­tance of opti­miz­ing our breath­ing pat­tern in order to pro­mote healthy diges­tion as well as calm­ing the ner­vous sys­tem. The authors rec­om­mend that the stres­sors that are the root cause of hold­ing the breath be iden­ti­fied as they hap­pen. This brings us to the thresh­old of that which is in our aware­ness, and that which lies just out­side of our aware­ness. The focus of sub­tle learn­ing here is to train breath aware­ness so that we pay more atten­tion to how we are breath­ing through­out the con­flu­ence of every­day life.

In What Is Steal­ing Your Breath? a sub­tle learn­ing process is pre­sented, which I would like to expand upon here. The sub­tle learn­ing process for elim­i­nat­ing breath hold­ing and opti­miz­ing breath­ing is threefold:

1. Atten­tion: We must first bring our breath­ing into atten­tion so that we begin to observe it through­out the day and notice how it changes rel­a­tive to the expe­ri­ences we are hav­ing. This requires a sig­nif­i­cant amount of men­tal effort since breath­ing is an uncon­scious event. How­ever, if we have devel­oped bad habits, such as hold­ing the breath, then our uncon­scious can unfor­tu­nately embrace those bad habits as well. By pay­ing atten­tion to our breath­ing pat­terns through­out the day we can begin to develop con­scious knowl­edge of those pat­terns. Retriev­ing this knowl­edge from the realm of the uncon­scious to the first task in learn­ing to free the breath from hold­ing pat­terns, and there­fore improve our phys­i­cal and men­tal health as well.
2. Strate­gic Inter­rup­tion: Once we develop the skill of pay­ing atten­tion to our breath through­out the day, we are then in a posi­tion to strate­gi­cally inter­rupt the habit of hold­ing the breath. When our atten­tion is trig­gered by hold­ing our breath our con­scious mind becomes imme­di­ately aware and inter­rupts the hold­ing by com­mand­ing deep breath­ing. What would have been hold­ing our breath is trans­formed into a deep breath in the pre­cise moment required. Repeat­ing this process over time even­tu­ally breaks down the orig­i­nal habit of hold­ing the breath and replaces it with the more pro­duc­tive habit of deep breath­ing dur­ing moments of stress.
3. Aware­ness Train­ing: An active med­i­ta­tion process can be used to explore and inves­ti­gate the root causes and rea­sons for hold­ing the breath. For exam­ple, dur­ing med­i­ta­tion we can focus on spe­cific cir­cum­stances and sit­u­a­tions that incline us toward hold­ing our breath and reveal the essen­tial prob­lems within. In this way, the phys­i­cal aspects of learn­ing to opti­mize breath­ing dur­ing times of stress now become mind­ful oppor­tu­ni­ties to under­stand our­selves more deeply. This deeply per­sonal under­stand is the foun­da­tion for per­sonal growth and development.

One of the most chal­leng­ing aspects of this learn­ing process is that is seam­lessly inte­grated into the nat­ural fab­ric of our expe­ri­ence. This is the rea­son that the devel­op­ment of atten­tion is pre­req­ui­site. Sub­tle forms of learn­ing do not have a pre­de­ter­mined scope and sequence of knowl­edge and skills to be acquired. Instead, sub­tle learn­ing orig­i­nates in the moment to moment impro­vi­sa­tion of expe­ri­ence; it is exclu­sively focused on the aware­ness of the present moment.