Four Ways Breathwork Builds Better Habits
You’ve probably heard of breathwork, or conscious breathing as a way to decrease stress and anxiety. It’s an increasingly popular element of health and wellness routines and has been around for thousands of years in ancient cultures, with its roots in yoga practice. And these days, emerging science is backing up traditional wisdom, showing the benefits of breathwork for body and mind.
So, what’s it all about? What is breathwork and how can it support you to break old habits and build new, healthy habits?
Breathwork refers to any breathing exercise or technique where you consciously regulate your breath patterns for a certain time.
The science behind breathwork is this: When you are under physical or emotional stress, your breathing grows shallow and fast, and you may start breathing through your mouth rather than your nose. This reduces the oxygen entering your bloodstream and switches your autonomic nervous system into sympathetic mode, and specifically to the cortisol-fuelled stress response you probably know as ‘fight or flight’. It’s an acute response to a stressful moment, but left unchecked, it underlies the chronic state of hypervigilance that can lead to physical, mental and emotional health issues.
But it’s a process that works both ways, because when you work with the rhythm and length of your breath, you can restore calm and balance to your body and mind. When you breathe deeply and slowly, your nervous system receives the message that all is well, and your body then returns to resting mode, out of ‘fight or flight’.
When you are considering making changes to habitual and unhelpful patterns in your life, rewiring your nervous system in this way can support those changes to be more sustainable. That’s because you are teaching your body to reframe the way you respond to life’s stressful situation.
What are the health benefits of breathwork?
A growing number of studies have been done over recent years to evaluate how breathwork can affect the body’s stress response. A 1979 study published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology proved that controlled breathing exercises could be used as an effective coping strategy in stressful situations. More recently, a 2016 study introduced a diaphragmatic breathing program to participants with anxiety. Those participants evidenced a reduction in anxiety scores after practising the technique daily.
Triggering your parasympathetic nervous system through breathwork can help with many conditions, and research on its wide-ranging positive effects is promising.
The range of benefits includes
· Regulated blood pressure
· Increase in heart rate variability (HRV) – this indicates your breathing and heart rate are in sync, which is in turn connected to reduced stress, feelings of anger, and impulsive behaviour (Cuddy, 2018).
· Enhanced mental focus
· Reduced anxiety
· Better sleep
· Reduction of inflammation
· Strengthening respiratory function
Breathwork to build better habits
Firstly, let’s define a habit. A habit can be described as “something that you do often and regularly, sometimes without knowing that you are doing it”. So one of the features of a habit is that it’s unconscious.
There are commonly four stages in a habitual process
· Cue
· Craving
· Response
· Reward
When you are looking to break a bad habit and create a new, healthy habit, you need to disrupt this process so that the loop isn’t completed. And that’s where breathwork comes in.
A 2011 study published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction found that Holotropic Breathwork showed success in supporting participants to abstain from alcohol and other addictive substances. In addition, it was a practice that helped them manage their depression, anxiety, and/or trauma associated with their addiction.
Here are four ways that breathwork helps break habits.
Habit replacement
Once you have identified the cue, or trigger, you can work on replacing the habitual response to that situation with something different. This can be easier than just trying to stop the unwanted habitual response. For example, say you’re faced with a difficult task at work that you aren’t sure you’ll complete in time, and you would usually put that task off and instead check your messages, or reach for a snack. Next time that happens, try taking yourself away for five minutes and following a breathwork practice that calms your anxiety, or simply energises you. As you repeat this new behaviour, you will be developing the impulse to follow this new routine. Eventually, as you reap the rewards from your new habit – clearer focus, more energy, better productivity – your old habit will begin to fall away.
Breaking the cycle
As an active form of meditation, regulating your breathing allows you to gain some emotional distance from habitual thoughts and a racing mind and drop your awareness deeper into your heart and body.
Clear your mind
Breathwork can sharpen your focus when you’re having a stressful day – one of those days you might typically reach for the food that you know doesn’t support you, or the phone that only distracts you. According to a study published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, just through the practice of slowing down your breathing and paying attention to the rhythm of your breath, your mind grows more focused as your parasympathetic nervous system is triggered and any emotional response to the stressful situation is calmed.
Rewire your nervous system
The practice of breathwork has been shown to stimulate the cerebral cortex area of your brain. This is the area involved in memory, attention, perception, cognition, awareness, thought, language, and consciousness. Working with intentional breathing exercises, you can stimulate the growth of new brain cells in this region.
Breathwork – a simple tool for breaking habits
One of the best things about breathwork is that it is simple and can be done anywhere and any time. So if you’re trying to break a habit that’s embedded in a busy day, or a hectic week, breathwork is an ideal tool to use. All you need is some commitment to building up your practice.