Short of breath lately? Or just breathing the same short breaths you and virtually everyone else on earth have always breathed? If so, you’re shortchanging yourself, depriving your body of the benefits of greater oxygen intake. Few people breathe enough air to meet their optimum oxygen needs.

 

It’s really quite simple. Most people breathe using only part of their lung capacity - to be precise, the upper one third. This is called subsistence breathing because it is just enough to keep you alive, functioning at a minimum level. Take a “deep” breath and observe what happens. Your upper chest swells up like the Big Bad Wolf about to blow the house down. This may give you a surge of emotional energy or feeling of power, but meets only your minimum needs for oxygen.

 

When you stress your body physically, what happens? You start panting and puffing, drawing air as deeply into your lungs as you can while you try to meet the sudden increased need for oxygen caused by the stress.

 

The question is: What would happen if you had regular access to this increased amount of oxygen?

 

Think of your circulatory system. You take in oxygen from the air you breathe. The oxygen enters your bloodstream and creates oxygen-rich blood that flows through your veins where it liberates the energy in the food you ingest and collects the toxins and poisons generated through your everyday living and expels them as CO2. It stands to reason that more oxygen would give you more energy-producing, oxygen-rich blood, and the use of more lung capacity would enable you to expel more toxins and poisons, especially those lurking in the lower two-thirds of your lungs. This kind of maximization of oxygen intake is what you can achieve through what is called conscious (also abdominal or dynamic) breathing. I call it smart breathing.

 

Don’t, by the way, confuse smart breathing with hyperventilation, which is abnormally rapid breathing which results in an excessive loss of carbon dioxide from the blood and is distinctly not good for you. Conscious breathing is inherently slow and deep.

 

Conscious breathing improves your health and your feeling of well-being, increasing your basic supply of energy, and more effectively expelling the toxins in your system.

 

That’s it. You’ll feel better and healthier with no investment of money and little investment of time, and, in addition, you’ll add an especially pleasurable few minutes to a day which, if you are like the rest of us, probably has or will have its surfeit of stresses.

 

Here are a couple of easy exercises to get you started:

 

PAY ATTENTION!

Attention breathing is a preparatory exercise which focuses your awareness on the natural rhythm of your breath, not to control it but simply to observe it as a bodily function. Concentrate on the feeling of the body as it breathes. Feel the air as it enters your nostrils. Follow it as it flows into the lungs and notice how deeply it reaches. As you exhale, feel the used air as it is expelled from your body.

 

 

Abdominal breathing, or belly breathing, is by far the best method to begin modifying your breathing habits Regular practice brings quick, tangible results. It is easy to learn and difficult to do incorrectly. It is so easy, in fact, it is the way babies breathe. Unfortunately, like so many of the virtues we exhibit as babies, we lose it as we grow up.

 

Abdominal Breathing is about filling the lungs completely. Instead of using only the chest or the top third of the lungs, Abdominal Breathing seeks to expand lung capacity by starting from the lowest part of the lungs. The focus, therefore, is on the abdomen, an area roughly three finger widths below the navel.

 

 

That’s all you need to get started breathing smarter. Now you just need to remember to do it.