Breathing Exercise For Sleep
We’ve all felt the difference between a good night of energising sleep, and waking up puffy eyed, dragging yourself to the nearest pot of coffee to get the day going. We all know how important sleep is! It’s essential for maintaining good health and well-being. But more than that, improving sleep quality can be the difference between grinding away day after day, and taking control of your dreams, pun intended!
Modern life can have a devastating effect on sleep. The fast-paced daily routines and constant connection to technology put an incredible load on the nervous system. There’s the cognitive impact on memory, concentration and decision-making. Our emotional well-being suffers with mood swings, irritability and a heavy contribution to anxiety. There’s physical consequences, like low energy, weakened immune support and a greater risk of long-term health problems. And on top of all of that, there’s the performance factors: slow reactions, errors in judgement, and dramatically decreased output. Absolutely no good comes from a poor night’s sleep. But life has to go on, good sleep or bad, constantly connected to technology and fuelling the fires of stress with caffeine, energy drinks, and medication. So if sleep quality is such an indicator of your own vitality, how can you improve this 100% free asset?
Of course there’s the usual stuff; avoid blue light, don’t use your phone before bed, wear blue light blocking glasses, have a cool and dark bedroom, don’t drink alcohol late in the evening. But they address the enormous role that everyday breathing has on your sleep quality.
So why haven’t breathing technique and exercise for sleep made headlines?
The short answer, they’re not “sexy”, and they’re not that “sellable”. But make no mistake, functional breathing absolutely impacts your sleep quality! In fact, recently a friend told me she was having psychological nightmares every night. Her boyfriend realised that she would stop breathing in her sleep, then take a big gasp. She started mouth taping to promote nasal breathing and hasn’t had a nightmare for 8 months. Dysfunctional breathing is not only a problem for the respiratory system. It has a significant impact on your overall health. And it often prevents people from getting to sleep, or once they do, they have poor quality sleep.
Functional Breathing exercise And Sleep
Functional breathing is multidimensional and includes 3 main components:
The biomechanical component of breathing. Do you breathe through your nose? Do you breathe light, slow and deep, engaging the diaphragm?
The biochemical component of breathing. This is how sensitive you are to CO2. Carbon dioxide drives the inhalation, and the less resistant you are to CO2, the more likely you'll take faster, higher, shorter breaths through your mouth.
The psycho-physiological component of breathing. This takes into account your stress levels, chronic fatigue, anxiety, long covid and other symptoms that affect breathing.
All three influence your breathing function and all three influence each other. If you breathe short, fast and through the mouth, your tolerance to CO2 is probably low, making you more likely to breathe that way during stress. When you fall asleep, and the conscious mind is no longer in control, it’s more likely you will resort to mouth breathing. That invokes a stress response that reduces sleep quality and wreaks havoc on your day ahead. What a little merry-go-round of problems! It’s known that people with a higher threshold (are less sensitive) to CO2 generally breathe in a calm, healthy way. Their breathing remains relatively light during rest and sleep. With that in mind, how can you improve your everyday breathing habits?
Nose Breathing For your health, your body & sleep
First up, let’s get the entry and exit correct! You want to breathe through your nose. Mouth breathing cools, dries and constricts the airways. It doesn’t ventilate the lower regions of the lungs (where most of the blood is concentrated). It produces no nitric oxide, which is intimately connected to sleep homeostasis. And it activates the stress response, leaving the airways more vulnerable to collapse - which can cause snoring and even stop your breathing altogether. So the first step is to practice nasal breathing during the day because, as I’ve mentioned, if your breathing during the day is dysfunctional, your breathing during sleep will be dysfunctional.
Breathing technique & Your B.O.L.T. Score
The BOLT score (or Body Oxygen Level Test) is a simple indicator of how well you are breathing. It tests your tolerance to carbon dioxide, the primary stimulus to breathe. Whatever your tolerance is at rest, it will be similar during exercise and sleep. To test yourself: take a normal inhale and exhale, pinch the nose to hold the breath, and note how long in seconds it takes to reach the first definite physical desire to breathe. The goal is to reach a BOLT score of 40 seconds. A score of less than 25 seconds strongly suggests dysfunctional breathing and a tendency to breathe through the mouth when the body is under stress. The good news is your BOLT score can be dramatically improved by practising the following exercises daily.
3 Breathing exercises for Sleep
These 3 exercises are used by Oxygen Advantage (who developed the BOLT score) practitioners and are designed to help improve your biochemical and biomechanical breathing function. They’re very simple and very practical tools!
Breathe Light for 10 minutes three times daily
Breathe light helps to improve chemosensitivity to CO2 by reducing the volume of air you take into your body. The goal is to create a tolerable hunger for air, a feeling that you are not quite getting enough air or you want to take a bigger breath. With a slight but tolerable air hunger, CO2 builds up in the blood, and nitric oxide accumulates in the nasal cavity before travelling to the lungs. The blood vessels open and more oxygen is released from the red blood cells to feed your tissues and organs.
Directions:
Sit up straight in a chair or cross-legged on the floor or lie down on your back.
Observe your breath as it enters and leaves your nose. Focus on feeling the slightly colder air entering your nose and the slightly warmer air leaving your nose.
Reduce the speed of each breath as it enters and leaves your nose. Don’t restrict or control it, just reduce the speed in a light, quiet, relaxed way.
Slow down your breathing so that you feel hardly any air entering and leaving your nostrils. Your breathing should be so quiet that the fine hairs in the nostrils do not move.
Create the feeling that you would like to take in more air and stick with this to maintain air hunger.
If you feel stressed or lose control of your breathing, the air hunger is too strong. Rest for 20 seconds and start again.
Breathe Deep for 10 minutes, once daily
This exercise helps to improve biomechanical function by engaging the diaphragm. The diaphragm is the main breathing muscle and it's important for calming the mind, improving gas exchange deep in the lungs and supporting posture. The emphasis here is on improving HOW you breathe. Try to remain light, slow and quiet at all time.
Directions:
Sit up straight in a chair, or cross-legged on the floor.
Place your hands at either side of your lower ribs.
As you inhale, feel your ribs expand outwards. As you exhale, feel your ribs move inward. Silently take fuller breaths but fewer of them to bring air deeper into the lungs.
Breathe Slow for 10 minutes, twice daily
This exercise involves reducing the cadence (speed) of your breathing to six breaths per minute. It has many benefits, including improved efficiency, improved oxygenation and reduced chemosensitivity to CO2. Try to engage the diaphragm to draw your breath deep into the lung. The size of each breath will naturally increase, but just be careful not to increase it disproportionately. The goal is still to feel the slightest air hunger, which will show that you are’t over-breathing.
If your BOLT score is less than 15 seconds, slowing the rate to 6 breaths per minute can be challenging. So if that’s you, try breathing in for 3 seconds and out for 3 seconds (10 breaths per minute). As your BOLT score improves, you can reduce the breathing rate to 6 breaths.
Directions:
Sit up straight on a chair or cross-legged on the floor. Place your hands either side of your abdomen on your lower ribs.
Inhale for a count of four seconds and exhale for a count of six seconds. Instruct your own count with, “In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6”. If your BOLT score is less than 15 seconds, start with a 3 second count.
As you breathe in, feel your ribs moving outwards, and as you breathe out, feel your ribs moving inwards.
Breathing Exercises Help Your Sleep
Your breathing habits at night are a mirror of your breathing function during the day. By practicing these exercises daily, you will help to improve functional breath during sleep. Then in those moments at night when you have no conscious control, your breathing has a better chance of staying light, slow, deep and through the nose. You’ll sleep more deeply and wake up ready to take on the world.
And one last thing, if your mouth is naturally moist in the morning, it’s a great indicator that you’re breathing through your nose at night. But if your mouth is dry, it suggests there’s open mouth breathing happening during sleep. And if that’s you, using mouth tape to promote nasal breathing can have an amazing effect!