Why Breath Matters
Over the course of your life, you’ll take 670 million breaths. The effects of how you breathe, good or bad, add up over time.
This is what I’m learning from James Nestor’s incredible book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. I’m only halfway through it right now, and it is blowing my mind.
Take this little nugget for instance: “The greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity...Our ability to breathe full breaths was, according to the researchers, ‘literally a measure of living capacity.’”
That means that how well you breathe today affects how well you breathe tomorrow and in twenty years and if you’re still breathing in 40 years.
Most of us are over-breathers, meaning we breathe quickly in short, shallow breaths. This is very inefficient, as “our lungs will absorb only about a quarter of the available oxygen in the air. The majority of that oxygen is exhaled back out. By taking longer breaths, we allow our lungs to soak up more in fewer breaths.”
One of the best ways to breathe slowly is to pray.
Most world religions have some kind of spoken prayer; in Catholicism there’s the rosary, Buddhist monks chant Om Mani Padme Hum, in kundalini yoga it’s sa ta na ma. Across all kinds of prayer, the same breathing pattern is used: the spoken phrase lasts about six seconds with six seconds to inhale before the chant starts again.
When humans follow this slow breathing pattern, six second inhale and six second exhale, ”blood flow to the brain increased and the systems in the body entered a state of coherence, when the functions of heart, circulation, and nervous system are coordinated to peak efficiency. The moment the subjects returned to spontaneous breathing or talking, their hearts would beat a little more erratically, and the integration of these systems would slowly fall apart.”
So, you want to breathe better for many more years? You don’t have to subscribe to any organized religion. Just breathe slowly. Six seconds in, six seconds out.
Buy James Nestor’s Breath here.