If you're stressed or traumatized, if you have to do something scary or difficult, if you're having trouble concentrating, or if you just can't fall asleep, what's the best thing to do? Surprisingly, a simple technique works in all these situations Controlling your breath. If you have practiced yoga, you are already familiar with breath control exercises and how using your breath to move through poses makes yoga more effective. Controlling your breathing can also help you lower your blood pressure and help you fall asleep, calm down, focus your mind, and help you prepare for a challenging or frightening task. Some Navy SEALs even use it before going into battle. No wonder we so commonly tell each other to take a deep breath when faced with a difficult situation.
Since controlling and slowing breathing has a measurable effect on mental state, it seems quite likely that it somehow affects brain function. But how exactly? Scientists have been working on that question and now they have some pretty clear answers. In an experiment at Stanford, scientists selectively shut down neurons related to breathing in the brains of bioengineered mice. They found that the mice still exhibited all forms of mouse breathing, sighing, sniffing, yawning, etc., but were less likely to sniff and more likely to breathe slowly than normal mice. At the same time, they were the least stressed and most relaxed mice ever. If you put them in a new environment where the mouse's usual response would be to run and explore, the mice with the neurons turned off would simply sit still and relax by preening.
Now, in a new experiment, scientists examined the brain activity of people with electrodes implanted directly into their brains. The subjects of the experiment were epileptics who could not control their disease with medication and planned to treat it with surgery. As part of the preparation, they had to have the electrodes monitor their brains for a few days so doctors could look at exactly which parts of their brains were activated during a seizure to learn which part of the brain to isolate.
The researchers took advantage of this highly unusual situation by first observing the patients' normal, uncontrolled breathing, giving them unrelated tasks to focus their attention elsewhere, and then instructing them to speed up or slow down their breaths. With the electrodes in place, they were able to observe that intentionally breathing faster or slower activated different sections of the subjects' brains. In fact, intentional breathing may be the key ingredient here. It seems that simply by concentrating on controlling our breathing we can access regions of the brain that we normally cannot activate. More research is needed to better understand precisely how slower or faster breathing specifically changes brain function to make us calmer, more anxious, more sleepy, or more alert. But for now, the bottom line is this: When you use breathing exercises to relax or calm down or to deal with a difficult moment, you're using a very, very powerful tool that will really affect how your brain works.
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