When my kids get nervous or are having a meltdown, I instinctively tell them to take a deep breath. It鈥檚 a reflex that I know innately feels good during a moment of panic or before a big presentation. But new evidence suggests breathing does more than just oxygenate the body 鈥� it fundamentally changes our brain, decreasing anxiety, sharpening our senses and enhancing our ability to perform. Those breakthroughs have left me wondering: could I improve my day, just by using my breath better?
It was 400 million years ago that rhythmic air-breathing enabled vertebrates to move from the sea to the land. And while we tend to think about our breathing only when it changes in response to our environment 鈥� if someone gives us a fright or we鈥檝e done some heavy exercise, for instance 鈥� research shows how we breathe can in turn change how we think and feel.
For example, one of the most well-studied breathing techniques, pranayama 鈥� the act of conscious breath control 鈥� has been shown to . Part of the reason appears to be that when we breathe in deeply, 聽and stimulates a branch of the nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system. This feels calming, because the parasympathetic nervous system can act as a brake on our fight-or-flight stress response.
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But there鈥檚 also something else going on. A recent review in Nature details how breathing , making them more or less likely to fire an electrical impulse, which is how brain cells communicate with one another. Breathing provides a rhythmic reference signal, acting like an orchestral conductor to help groups of neurons associated with the same job coordinate their activity.
Breathing in sharpens the mind
at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and her team put this idea to the test in people who had electrodes placed in their brain due to epilepsy. They found that inhalation , which processes smell and integrates this information with memories and emotion, and the limbic system, which is also involved in memory and emotion.
To investigate whether breathing in or out affects cognition differently, they ran two experiments in the same group of people with epilepsy. In one, participants had to distinguish between faces showing fear or shock. In the second, they were presented with images of objects, then later shown another set of objects and asked to confirm whether they had seen them previously or not.
Participants were faster and more accurate at recognising facial emotions when they were breathing in than when they were breathing out. Likewise, they were better at remembering images they had encountered when breathing in, and they more easily recalled whether they had seen an object while they were inhaling.
Other studies have shown similar results. For instance, when at the University of Haifa, Israel, and his colleagues asked 31 people to mentally manipulate objects to work out which could exist in real life, they found participants鈥� and reduced while exhaling. Intriguingly, when participants could decide for themselves when to attempt the task, they were more inclined to start while inhaling, unconsciously syncing their efforts with their breath.
All of this research points to the same conclusion: inhalation seems to prime the brain for incoming sensory information and sharpens cognitive performance for specific tasks.
As to whether we can use this knowledge to improve our performance outside the lab has yet to be fully explored. Perl acknowledges that most things we encounter in daily life unfold over multiple breaths rather than us performing actions in a single second. But he thinks there is a greater chance of registering a surprising event if it occurs during inhalation 鈥� something you might want to think about next time you鈥檙e on the receiving end of a fast tennis serve, for example. 鈥淎fter being introduced to this topic and learning how it links to virtually every aspect of our lives, I became more aware of how I breathe in certain situations,鈥� says Perl. 鈥淚 now actively adjust my breathing during times of stress or heightened focus.鈥�
The benefits of nasal breathing
Another interesting finding is that in many of the studies that test the effect of breathing on cognition, performance decreases significantly when people breathe through their mouth rather than their nose.
This may be because of the unique neural activity engaged by nasal breathing. For instance, in Zelano鈥檚 study, the team found that nasal breathing increased certain types of brain activity associated with learning in the olfactory cortex and limbic system. This activity was reduced when the same people breathed through their mouths.
Why would nasal breathing have such benefits? One theory is that the brain has evolved to respond more strongly to nasal airflow because it often carries important information involving scent, which can signal food, danger or kinship.
In discovering all of this, it feels a shame that so much of our breathing happens subconsciously. Part of the reason we are unaware of the effects of our breathing simply comes down to technology, says Perl. 鈥淚f people had better ways to visualise or monitor their breathing, they would be better informed about how it changes during different activities,鈥� he says. He now pays closer attention to his breathing during tasks like answering emails or watching TV, because he鈥檚 experimenting with devices that log this data for his research. 鈥淚 hope that future advances in wearable technology will help people understand their breathing patterns and perhaps alert them when they adopt potentially detrimental habits,鈥� he says.
Perhaps in the future our wearables will prompt us to breathe deeper when anxiety levels spike, or nudge us to switch to nasal breathing during tasks that demand more cognitive focus. Until then, next time you need to calm a toddler, step into a presentation or face an oncoming serve, take a deep breath in, and enjoy the cognitive and emotional benefits.
