Breathing Is Your Superpower

By Dr. Arianne Missimer

We can go three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air. Breathing isn't something you commonly think about. In fact, it's an action that generally goes unnoticed altogether. The first thing you ever do after exiting the birth canal is take a deep breath. When your breathing is compromised, however, your health can be negatively affected.
For instance, while stress can lead to bad breathing, bad breathing will almost certainly affect your ability to manage stress. Like a domino effect, it can topple onto other major systems in your body: your digestive, lymphatic, immune, and/or endocrine (hormonal) system, disturbing your chemical makeup, sleep patterns, ability to detoxify and, most notably, your body's overall movement quality, core function, and posture. If that information doesn't unveil the importance of breathing, consider this: On average, we breathe 20,000-25,000 times a day. It's that's necessary. That integral to what we do at and in every single moment. Therefore, HOW we breathe matters immensely. And the better we are at breathing, the better our health will be. Or, to state it even more bluntly, the better we are at breathing, the better our lives will be. This is precisely what makes breathing our superpower.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098361853

Book preview

Thoughts

Introduction to Breathing

We can go three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air.

Breathing isn’t something you commonly think about. In fact, it’s an action that generally goes unnoticed altogether. This isn’t surprising considering how, when you’re used to doing something, it becomes second nature, right? Therefore, it’s natural to do these things subconsciously. It’s what you’ve been doing since your very beginning: all the way back to the seconds after you were born. The first thing you ever do after exiting the birth canal is take a deep breath. https://youtu.be/yz9k3-xKXXI

This is why babies are expected to come out crying. It’s their way of letting us know they’re doing what is essential to life: breathing.

Yet what is breathing? What is this action that supports our entire physical being and wellbeing?

Physiologically speaking, it’s the act of inhaling air into our lungs, which consists of many different gases, oxygen being one of them. It is that element that is vital to sustaining our life. When we breathe air into our lungs, oxygen is exchanged (mostly) with carbon dioxide, which is a waste product we then exhale, but is also imperative to delivering oxygen to our cells. Air journeys a series of passages starting from the nose, nasopharynx, oropharynx, laryngeal pharynx, and trachea to the bronchi and bronchioles in the lungs. Think of the bronchi as a conducting system for the air to eventually travel into the aveoli, tiny air sacs in the lungs, where the gas exchange ultimately takes place. The oxygen from the air passes into your bloodstream in the surrounding, tiny blood-containing structures that connect arterioles, a small branch of the artery, to venules, very small veins. They are so small and therefore can penetrate to the body’s tissues, allowing oxygen, nutrients, and waste products to be exchanged between the tissues and the blood. Essentially, they are transporting to all of our cells exactly what they need to survive and be healthy.

The respiratory control center in the brain signals your respiratory muscles and monitors sensors in the blood vessels, muscles, and lungs that measure the amount of carbon dioxide, oxygen, and acidosis in the blood. This allows your brain to adjust your breathing to meet the changing needs of your body. Your body's sensors measure those changes and communicate with the respiratory control center to increase your breathing rate and the amount of oxygen you're taking in. For example, think about how your body responds when you move from walking to running or walking uphill.

If this essential function is hindered, much less cut off completely, it will have drastically negative effects on other aspects of your health. This is why we should never overlook the power of breathing. In fact, we should do our best to master it.

Breathing isn’t just our first motor program. It’s also the most essential and foundational motor program we have. Although there are many variations of breath practices, there is a proper way to breathe; in through the nose, out through the nose, approximately 10 to 14 breaths per minute in a steady rhythmical pattern. Because the objective of breathing is to meet the metabolic demands