YOUR BODY'S BATTLE FOR HOMEOSTATIS

There’s an ongoing battle for homeostasis going on within our body. Through our breathing, we are constantly searching for balance by engaging the two branches of our autonomic nervous system; the sympathetic, which speeds things up and readies us for action, and the parasympathetic that slows things down, and facilitates rest.

With every full cycle of our breath, these branches are activated, shifting the chemistry of our body, our heart, our brain and, ultimately, our emotional state.

With controlled breathing, we are bringing our consciousness to a process which is normally unconscious, to harness it for our wellbeing. Your autonomic nervous system is both a thermometer and a thermostat, constantly checking the emotional temperature of the environment and also regulating your response to it.

Chronic stress results when you think of the world as an unsafe place, whether through trauma, real or imaginary threat or a negative thinking style. As a result, the sympathetic nervous system stays over-aroused.

This takes its toll on both mind and body and can eventually lead to serious medical conditions that may actually shorten your lifespan. That’s why finding a simple, science-based hack to counteract stress is really useful especially when it only takes 5-10 minutes a day to feel the benefit.

Resonant breathing

There are lots of breathing techniques out there and many of them have been around for a long time; 7/11 breathing, Buteyko breathing, box breathing and yogic breathing for instance.

But the latest research indicates it’s a practice called Resonant Breathing with a pattern of around 6 breaths a minute that may have the edge on the others as it has a powerful effect on?heart rate variability.

In simple terms, heart rate variability, or HRV, refers to the amount of time that passes between each beat of your heart. When you deliberately decrease your rate of breathing, you naturally increase the amount of time between your heartbeats. Most people take between?12 and 20 breaths per minute so Resonant Breathing requires you to cut your normal breathing rate by at least a half.

We have known for a very long time that slowing the breathing rate has a calming effect on both body and mind. Now, fortunately, due to our better understanding of the autonomic nervous system and studies like Polyvagal Theory, we can explain why. Resonant Breathing helps you tip the scales back in favour of the parasympathetic nervous system. Effectively, your brain tells your body that your world is a safe place and it’s ok to relax.?

To summarise, when we breathe in, we tense; when we breathe out, we relax.?

So it follows that, if we engage a breathing pattern of a longer out breath than in breath, we cannot help but start to relax and we are, in fact, tapping into the body’s own Relaxation Response.?

Also, with the understanding that our emotional and rational hemispheres do not work efficiently at the same time, if we are counting while we breathe (out to the count of 6 and in to the count of 4 (which fits with the 6 breaths a minute resonant breathing technique) we are also having to engage the rational brain that deals with numbers. That pulls back control to the rational brain which then allows the emotional brain to settle down.

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