Breathing Relief with Dr. Amy: Posture and Breathing
Breathing changes
Breathing is something we do every day without thinking about it. We take it for granted until our health takes a bad turn, or we become ill. We don’t realize that our breathing pattern changes as we age, like the rest of our bodily functions. How we walk now is different from how we walked as children. The same is true for breathing. Stress and changes in our bodies impact our breathing patterns over time. The solution to restoring our health is not breath work alone but a combination of body positioning with breath work.
Breath for fighting
Besides giving us oxygen and letting out carbon dioxide, how we breathe can calm down the ‘fight-or-flight’ nervous system. You might have experienced a fight-or-flight state when you heard a loud noise that frightened you, or maybe when you received some terrible news. Your heart beats faster, your body tightens, and you feel on edge.
Alert breathing
Our bodies are not designed to stay in this fight-or-flight state for long, but unfortunately, many of us remain in a high-alert state for most of the day. The breathing pattern we choose (yes, we choose this) influences our nervous system. It determines whether we stay in that fight-or-flight state or a calm, relaxed state.
Stay relaxed
Ideally, we’d like to be in a relaxed state for most of our waking and sleeping hours. The ramped-up state should be reserved for emergencies that spur us to fight, flee, or freeze.
Relax with the diaphragm
Our task, then, is to learn how to use our diaphragm when we breathe. The diaphragm is a large muscle just above the abdomen that should be used to breathe, but many of us use our ribs, shoulders, head, and back. You can tell if you do this with a simple test.
Test yourself
Sit in front of a mirror, inhale, and see what moves. STOP: Try this before reading on. Did your rib cage lift up? Did your head tilt back? Did your shoulders lift up? Did your back arch a little more? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you aren’t using your diaphragm to breathe correctly.
Calm the nerves
Breathing with the diaphragm instead of the other body parts mentioned above is important because breathing with the diaphragm calms us down. When we breathe with the diaphragm, we activate a nerve that brings us into a relaxed state, the vagus nerve. This can provide relief — relief from pain, stress, anxiety, insomnia, and more.
Position your body
Before we can alter our breathing pattern to use our diaphragm, we have to look at body positioning. The position of our ribs affects how we breathe and affects the joints in our body from head to toe. If your ribs are lifted up in front, then you are not providing support for your diaphragm, and you’ll be breathing in a fight-or-flight pattern. To tell if you are lifting your ribs, put both hands on the front lower ribs and slide your hands from your ribs down to your belly. If you feel a drop-off when you slide your hands off your ribs, you are lifting your ribs up.
Position affects pain
The position of your ribs also impacts body pain. When your ribs are lifted up, the back muscles activate. They will dominate your movement and trigger the fight-or-flight system. This tightens up your whole body and pulls on joints abnormally.
Sit up! Not.
Do you remember hearing, “Sit up straight, put your shoulders back, suck up your gut”? We heard this growing up from our parents, gym teachers, and others. We wanted to be successful, so we followed this well-meaning advice. Unfortunately, this posture sets our nervous system and breathing pattern into a heightened state.
Feel your body
Try an experiment. First, relax into a sitting position. Then sit up in this ‘perfect posture’ and note what you feel. Did you feel your low back muscles kick in as you lifted up your chest and pulled your shoulders back? Did you feel the tension in your body increase? What happened is we triggered our fight-or-flight system that is controlled by our back. We kicked it into high gear by contracting our back muscles. When we do this, our overall tension increases. If we don’t recognize this and learn to relax, this tense position becomes our new normal.
Posture for breathing
If you stay in that ‘perfect posture’ position and breathe, you can feel how you lift your ribs to get air in. That means you aren’t using your diaphragm effectively to get air in and are forced to rely on lifting your ribs to breathe.
Make space for your lungs
In this posture, your diaphragm doesn’t have the proper support during inhalation to press down and create space for air to flow into your lungs like a vacuum. Without enough room to inflate our lungs, we have to resort to using our back, neck and shoulder muscles to lift up our ribs to create space to inflate our lungs. Also, without using the diaphragm, we don’t activate the calming nerve, as mentioned above.
Body relief
If sucking in your gut, pulling your shoulders back, and sticking out your chest changes your breathing pattern to fight-or-flight mode, then changing your body position can calm your nervous system. To calm your nervous system, breathe with the diaphragm. Our side abdominal muscles (transverse abs and obliques) support the diaphragm, allowing it to work better during both inhalation and exhalation. These muscles also help keep our ribs down in the front and in a neutral position. If we let our belly button relax and use our side abs to pull our ribs down, we can support the diaphragm during breathing. This is the beginning of giving your body the relief and freedom it needs.
Fight tension
Sometimes we need to be ramped up — if we’re fleeing from someone or fighting for our lives. However, these events increase the stress hormone cortisol. We don’t want excess cortisol in our bodies, as it increases inflammation. We also don’t want extra muscle tension to build up in our chests, creating pressure and possibly leading to other body pain.
Learn to relax
Fortunately, we can learn to relax those muscles and use the diaphragm. This improves oxygen flow and lowers stress and anxiety.
Start with breathing
The power to change how you feel and to heal starts with your breath and body position. For the next few months, work on being aware of how you are breathing and what your body posture is. Also, try to monitor your stress level and arousal. Keep watch over these. Next time, we’ll look further into breathing and posture for pain relief and better health.
