Are You Breathing Wrong?

I bet you didn’t know there was a wrong way to breath, did you? I know, you’re thinking Nicole my body has been breathing on its own for this many years, of course it knows what it’s doing. Maybe. But for most of us the way we breath is not the way our bodies were designed, and it can impact our health.

Do this right now. Put one hand on your stomach and one hand on your chest. Now take a deep breath. Which hand moved more? The one on the chest or the one on your stomach?

For most of us, the hand on our chest moves more.

Have you ever watched a sleeping baby? Babies breath through their stomach. Their tiny tummies go up and down and their chests stay pretty stable. That’s how our bodies were designed to breath.

But as we get older we learn to breath more shallow through our chest. Part of this is because we learn to talk, and we need to take smaller breaths to speak. Part of it is because of social pressure to hold our stomachs in (especially women).

The result is that rather than taking full, deep breaths through our abdomen, we take short breaths through our chest.

Like I said this can impact our health. Did you notice when you took a big breath that your shoulders went up and down? Breathing shallow through our chest uses more muscles in our upper body, which means this is actually harder on our bodies. It can also lead to tension through our shoulders and neck.

Taking shallower breaths also can mean less oxygen is getting to our brains and bodies, which can make us feel tired, make it tough to concentrate, and even make us more prone to catching colds and flus!

The good news is that our breathing is under our control! We can train our brains to re-learn how to take deeper breaths through the abdomen.

Try this: Put one hand back on your stomach and one on your chest. Take 5 deep breaths trying to keep the hand on your chest as still as possible, and pushing the hand on your stomach out as far as possible. It will feel weird at first and takes some getting used to. But even once a day taking 5 of these deep abdominal breaths can reduce stress, reduce muscle tension, and improve your health!