How the right breathing techniques could change your life

It’s enticing clickbait. How could I be breathing wrong? Isn’t it involuntary? Is this another thing I need to worry about perfecting? And yet it’s believable enough: on any given day, you could find a fair chunk of the people around you complaining of fatigue, brain fog, poor digestion or aching muscles – all things that are attributed to breathing incorrectly. It’s a thing that sounds, in the words of comedian Stephen Colbert, truthy enough.

Physiotherapist Tania Clifton-Smith is an Auckland-based breathing educator and the author of How to Take a Breath. She says it’s probably an exaggeration to say most of us are breathing incorrectly. But the science does show that an awareness of our breathing can have a “profound effect” on many aspects of our health. “It’s not just about the efficiency of lung function, but your nervous system, digestive system, your lymphatic system, voice production – breathing goes beyond just getting air into the lungs.”

Breathing has an impact on every system in the body. A growing body of evidence shows optimal breathing benefits every­thing from blood pressure to diabetes to anxiety. Clifton-Smith says breathing exercises can even be useful for hormonal challenges such as menopause.

Another physiotherapist, Scott Peirce, who’s been researching breathing at AUT, reckons more than a few of us are not breathing as well as we could be. “I think there are probably shades of dysfunction,” he says.

Peirce got a surprise when he looked for healthy breathers to participate in his research. “I found that with a lot of the people who said, ‘I’m normal, I’m keen to be in your study’, about a third of them had to be excluded because they weren’t what I would consider a normal or optimal style of breather.”

He believes as a population we can be divided into thirds: a third are breathing optimally; a third are breathing poorly – “they have poor breathing mechanics or their muscles are not working well and they don’t breathe with their diaphragm, plus they’ve got a bunch of symptoms that go along with that”; then there’s a group in the middle who Peirce calls average breathers. “They aren’t breathing that well, but they get by; it’s not troubling them, they’re not getting symptoms.”

For those people, however, Peirce thinks there’s a benefit in learning to breathe better. “You could be breathing really badly and not get any symptoms with it. And you’re like, ‘Well, who cares?’

“I think there’s a bit of an opportunity for those people to get some better breathing in the bank before the wheels fall off, which, typically, always seems to [happen] at some point in your life, whether it’s through grief or stress or sickness.”

It’s alarming to consider that two-thirds of us may not be breathing optimally. Peirce agrees, but says breathing is flexible; we might not breathe the same way all the time.