Breathing Exercise Benefits: Why We Do It

Breathing exercises, why do we do them, and what are the benefits? For some, it’s the clarity. For others, it’s the energy. For many, it reduces their own stress and anxiety in very empowering ways. With so much popularity and so much new research in this space, it’s easy to get lost in the data of what happens and how. The truth is that every breath is a personal experience, and how each exercise affects us individually happens on a sliding scale. So first, understanding what works best for you is the most important part of the puzzle. But the evidence is everywhere: breathing exercises benefit your health and well-being in a long, long list of ways. And while this list of breathing exercise benefits is ever-growing, and there are some really cool tools here to improve your life experience, here are three of our favourite effects.

3 Breathing Exercise Benefits

Deeper Sleep And Better Recovery

Modern life can be devastating to your sleep health. The combination of performance pressures, poor diets, less movement and a constant connection to technology put an incredible load on the nervous system. Good quality sleep is essential for maintaining good quality health. When it comes to sleep, breathing exercises can benefit you by regulating the nervous system and preparing your body to go to sleep, then keep it there for the whole night.

Practicing slow, light and deep breathing exercises regularly during the day can improve how you breathe by lowering chemosensitivity to CO2 and improving your physical breathing mechanics. These help at night to maintain light, deep, nasal breathing when your system is on auto-pilot and habitual function takes over. Remember that poor breathing mechanics easily stress the body enough to wake you up in the middle of the night.

But there is hope if sleep is a problem for you! Exercises like box breathing, 4-7-8, or conscious connected breathing can promote relaxation, reduce stress, and regulate the autonomic nervous system. They all help the go-to-sleep part of sleeping when your racing mind and a life full of things to do are blocking the transition from wakefulness to sleep. By adding these breathing exercises to your nightly routine, you can help signal to the body that it’s time to wind down; the day is done, let’s go to sleep now. Consistently doing so helps to establish a really healthy sleep pattern.

Stress And Anxiety Control

Stress and anxiety are inextricably linked. The thought that caused your racing mind, shallow breath and beating heart did so because it brought on a fight or flight response. It starts with a trigger, a moment of stress that activates the sympathetic nervous system. Those physical symptoms increase your awareness of the problem at hand, leading straight into more anxious thoughts. More anxiety fuels the sympathetic response and the cycle keeps running on its own. Quite literally, one thought has created the environment for more stress and

Anxiety to thrive. And our mind is terrible at telling the difference between an actual danger and a perceived danger. If it feels any threat, the body reacts by stimulating a nervous system response. Whether it’s perceived or actual, chronic stimulation of the sympathetic can bring with it major health problems and contributes heavily to ongoing anxiety. How can you break the cycle? You guessed it, controlled breathing exercises that stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system and directly counter the sympathetic response to stress and anxiety.

Conscious breathing techniques, like the 4-7-8 breathing method, box breathing or Alternate Nostril Breathing, send a signal to your brain that you’re in a safe environment, activating a state of calm. By focusing on the breath you can anchor your racing mind, draw yourself back to the present moment with clarity and equanimity, and break that cycle of rumination. Alternate Nostril Breathing (Nadi Shodhana pranayama) even helps to balance the hemispheres of the brain, allowing us to experience a more accurate perception of what’s really going on.

Changing States Of Body And Mind

This is where the magic happens for all you experience seekers out there. Intentional breathing exercises can immediately affect and alter your sense of clarity, connection, and peace, in a truly profound way. All forms of breathwork will change our physiology and affect our emotional and psychological experience, but there are those that can really act on our physical bodies, minds, spirits, and energy centres. These are healing practices that draw on the full and ancient wisdom of your breath to tap into past trauma and learned patterns, releasing stress and tension at a deeper level. We live in a world full of both recognised and unseen tension, that people often carry through their lifetimes and even pass on to the next. There is a real need for deeper states of healing and this kind of breathwork offers a powerful and personalised option. Whether your first experience is at a therapy session, or a guided breath meditation at a festival, the sensations are real and the healing is happening.

Breathing Exercises: The Benefits Are Real

Our breath, our most gentle resource, is free and available whenever we need it. Using it properly can help to create harmony and peace in your life, especially in those moments of higher tension. We are all products of our upbringing, and that includes all the physical, mental and emotional tendencies. How we breathe is learned. How we show up in the world is learned. How we react to situations is learned. And those tendencies create our experience in this life. Unlearning these patterns isn't always easy but it’s always possible, and it’s liberating. Breathwork, like meditation, can help to unwind learned pathways and rewire better patterns that almost immediately change our physiological state. But this takes practice; how can we expect to be good at anything without practice? Using your breath as a tool for deep inquiry into who you are and how you function can reveal your own path for transformation. Whether it’s day-to-day functional improvements, or heightened states of awareness, the breath holds the key to our greatest healing potential.