Breath: The First Step To Health

Breath is an essential and basic part of life. If patients are not receiving the oxygen they need this causes their body to be under stress. In return this stress may be a cause of inflammation leading too many chronic conditions.

Being a doctor of chiropractic, my job is to always address the nervous system first.

There are two divisions of the central nervous system that you may be familiar with.

Sympathetic: Fight or flight response.
Parasympathetic: Rest and digest

Improper shallow chest breathing keeps you in your sympathetics for long periods of time.

I know most of our breathing is done unconsciously but I want to challenge you to bring awareness to breath.

How to know if you are breathing properly is if your belly expands on inhale and moves inward on the exhale, allowing you to drop into parasympathetics.

As you’re sitting there, I want you to take one hand and place it on your chest with the other hand on your belly; now take in a nice gentle breathe through your nose….

Notice which hand raised when you took in your breath? If the hand on the belly raised when your stomach expanded that’s a great start!

If you found that you were breathing with your chest, the next few paragraphs are important for you to read!

Dysfunctional breathing has become so prevalent today due to the excessive amounts of sitting. When people are sitting they are typically in a slouched position, making it very difficult to breathe. Instead of using our diaphragm for belly breathing we begin to recruit the muscles of our neck and shoulders. These muscles were never meant to be used as breathing muscles and actually signal to your nervous system that you are in a stressed out state due to the shortness of breath.

Tips for you:

This may be easier if you are laying flat on your back. Again, place one hand on your belly and the other on your chest. Slowly breathe in through your nose allowing your stomach to expand. If this difficult for you, then you may need to exaggerate the movement in order to learn it.

On your breath in, tuck your hips back behind you and push your belly forward. On your breath out, draw the hips forward pressing in on your belly.

I suggest 10 breaths throughout the day 2-3 times. This is just enough to bring awareness and start making changes in the way you may normally breathe. Many patients report back being sore from using intercostal and oblique muscles they haven’t engaged in a while.

This also allows for full expansion of lungs rather than just using a small portion, which is what happens with shallow chest breathing.

Proper breathing is essential to overall good health. Making this change can have an enormous impact on inflammation, improve your sleep and reduction of overall stress in the body.