YOGA: BREATHING
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It's something we do all day--most of us
without thinking about it--but did you know that how you breathe
can dramatically affect how you feel, how well your brain works, and even
how long you live?
I've reproduced below an excellent
article from The Los Angeles Times that I think summarizes the
issue brilliantly. I hope it sheds some light on the topic for you! Then
you can come to class with a new perspective on "this breathing thing." :)
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Stress and the Art of Breathing
Relaxation: Modern medicine is giving nontraditional breathing principles
a closer look.
By CAROL KRUCOFF, Special to The Times
(Los Angeles Times, July 10, 2000)
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.
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
schoolchildren struggling with attention deficit disorder. He's taught it
to refugees in war-torn 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.
"Slow, deep breathing is probably the
single best anti-stress medicine we have," says Gordon, a clinical
professor of psychiatry at the Georgetown University School of Medicine
and director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in the District of
Columbia. "When you bring air down into the lower portion of the lungs,
where oxygen exchange is most efficient, everything changes. Heart rate
slows, blood pressure decreases, muscles relax, anxiety eases and the mind
calms. Breathing this way also gives people a sense of control over their
body and their emotions that is extremely therapeutic."
A Nation of 'Chest Breathers'
Obviously, everyone alive knows how to breathe. But Gordon and other
experts in the emerging field of mind-body medicine, say that few people
in Western, industrialized 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," says Andrew Weil, director of
the Program in Integrative Medicine and clinical professor of internal
medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Weil teaches "breath
work" 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."
New Focus on Alternative Therapies
There is little scientific research documenting the healing power of
breathing, in part because its practice is so new in Western medicine. And
unlike drugs or devices, breathing has no manufacturer who must sponsor
studies to support its use.
Increased interest in studying the
effects of nontraditional healing therapies such as relaxation breathing
led to the founding in 1991 of the Office of Alternative Medicine, now the
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, at the
National Institutes of Health. As a result, more medical scientists are
beginning to examine the health impact of a variety of mind-body therapies
such as meditation, guided imagery and Eastern exercises--yoga, tai chi
and qi gong--which typically incorporate focused breathing.
One of the few studies to examine a
clinical application of yoga "belly breathing" found that menopausal women
who learned the technique were able to reduce the frequency of hot flashes
by about 50%.
"The average breathing rate is 15 to 16
cycles [inhaling and exhaling] per minute," says Robert Freedman, a
professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Wayne State
University School of Medicine in Detroit. "But with training, women can
slow their breathing down to seven or eight cycles per minute, which can
significantly reduce the frequency and intensity of hot flashes."
Deep diaphragmatic breathing and other
mind-body techniques can also significantly reduce symptoms of severe PMS
as well as anxiety, depression and other forms of emotional distress,
according to research by Alice Domar, an assistant professor of medicine
at Harvard Medical School and director of the Mind/Body Center for Women's
Health.
To teach the technique, Domar has
patients make a fist and squeeze it tight. "Then I ask them what happens
to their breath, and they realize that they've stopped breathing," she
says. "When we get anxious, we tend to hold our breath or breathe
shallowly." Domar then shows patients how to breathe deeply into the
abdomen, a process most women tell her runs counter to the "hold in your
stomach" breathing they've done all their adult lives.
Domar's favorite stress-reduction
technique is a short version of this breath-focus exercise, which she
calls a "mini-relaxation," or "mini." "You can do a mini when you're stuck
in traffic, at a boring meeting, whenever you look at a clock or any time
you pick up a phone," she says. "I have patients who do minis 100 times a
day." Minis are also helpful for people with medical conditions, who can
do deep breathing when they're having an IV started or undergoing
chemotherapy. Pamela Peeke, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at
the University of Maryland, incorporates breath work into her practice, in
part by getting her patients to exercise. "It's very hard to walk and take
little panicked breaths," says Peeke, who frequently takes patients out
for a "walk and talk."
In our stressed-out world, the
fight-or-flight response that kept our ancestors alive has turned into a
"stew and chew," contends Peeke, who studied the connection between stress
and fat at the National Institutes of Health. If no physical response
occurs after stress revs the body up for battle, chronically elevated
levels of stress hormones stimulate appetite and encourage fat cells deep
inside the abdomen to store what she calls "toxic weight."
For this reason, Peeke says, "I'm an
absolute crazy person about getting people to move." She encourages
Eastern movements, such as yoga and tai chi, which rely on taking deep
abdominal breaths. But she particularly urges patients to do aerobic
activity to help neutralize the effects of stress. "When people learn to
breathe properly, they can calm themselves," she says. "Then the stew
doesn't have to turn into a chew."
A Technique With Many Applications
In hospitals, breathing techniques once were taught only to women for
use during childbirth. Today, some hospitals have begun teaching
relaxation breathing to patients of both sexes and all ages being treated
for a wide range of conditions. At the Washington Hospital Center in the
District of Columbia, nurse Julie Oliver incorporates breath work into
support groups she leads, including one for people with congestive heart
failure and another for parents of babies in the neonatal intensive care
unit. "Using the breath to quiet the body can be very powerful," says
Oliver, who is clinical manager of the hospital's guided imagery program.
"Babies, especially premature babies, can
sense how the mother and father feel," Oliver says. "If the parents go in
full of muscle tension and start jiggling the baby, the baby gets too
stimulated, and the staff may need to tell the parents to back away, which
adds to everyone's stress."
Oliver had a chance to practice what she
preaches recently, when her newborn stayed in intensive care for three
days of observation. "I was so anxious to see Joseph, I found myself
getting all wound up," she recalls. So Oliver took a minute to do several
relaxation breaths, combined with positive thoughts. "I was able to go in
and take Joseph in my arms in a much quieter state of mind," she says.
Conscious breathing also was a part of
her delivery. "Focused breathing pulls your attention away from pain and
what's going on in your body," says Oliver, who teaches the technique to
heart patients about to undergo procedures in the cardiac catheterization
lab. She also teaches breathing to staffers. "It's an ideal form of stress
reduction," she says, "because it doesn't take any time away from work,
and you can do it anywhere."
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times
