Is Breathing Well More Important Than What We Eat?

Here's the insider scoop on why breathwork is the next frontier of the wellness movement, straight from the revitalize stage:

This was a unanimous agreement among all three panelists. Working with the breath in a daily practice helps you control your mental, physical, and emotional state. While you're able to feel the effects of breathwork almost immediately afterward, doing it daily helps you see results over time just like you would with a diet or exercise program.

This fact isn't groundbreaking unto itself, but in the context of evaluating what's best for our well-being it begs the question: why haven't we considered the way we breathe to be as important (or more important) as what we eat? Mackenzie, who works with athletes to improve performance, aptly pointed out that we have mastered cardiovascular training, strength and muscular training, but at present there's no standardized pulmonary training—not just for athletes, but for anyone. "You can't out-fitness this thing," he said when speaking about a recent project working with NFL players to increase their pulmonary capacity—it goes to show that even the most athletic people in the world need direction with their breathing.

Dr. Huberman (and the other panelists) asserted that breathwork is unique in that the "biohacking" and spiritual approaches, although different, actually have significant overlap when it comes to new research. There are two main advantages to being able to study this practice: first, it validates the spiritual work people have been doing for centuries, and second, it helps us identify a common denominator between practices like breathwork and yoga nidra, meditation, flow state, and more so we can better understand how to optimize and heal our bodies.

Breathing through the mouth keeps the breath in the chest, which is not where it is most effective at oxygenating and removing carbon dioxide from the body. One simple change we can all make today is to start breathing more through the nose. Noted!

Spiritually speaking, Neese explained that the breath is where our consciousness and subconscious meet. This resonated both with Huberman's scientific research that examines how breath interacts with our ability to alleviate the fear state, and also the concept that breath is the one physiological system we can control.

In addition to nasal breathing, Neese said that lengthening your exhale is one of the easiest things we can do to change our mental state, ground ourselves, and experience a deeper and more fulfilling breath.