Yoga
Slow breathing, as anyone who practises yoga or mediation knows, is calming for your mind and body. Slowing everything down brings with it a tranquillity and clearness of mind. Now new research, published in the journal PAIN, has shown that the benefits of slow breathing include reducing the level of pain that we feel.
Scientists at Barrow Neurological Institute St Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center and Arizona State University carried out their study with two groups of women aged from 45 to 65. One group had fibromyalgia, the other was the healthy control group.
Both groups were given low to moderate heat pulses, while they were breathing normally and again while they were breathing at half their normal rate. The results showed that when breathing slowly the women rated the pain as less intense and less painful. (However the effect of slow breathing on pain was more reliably effective for the healthy group and for those with positive personality traits.)
"Slow breathing is well known as a means of reducing pain, we use it all the time," says Robin Monroe, Director of the Yoga Biomedical Trust. "When we are anxious or stressed, we breathe more quickly, our CO2 levels go down and we feel more pain. If you slow down your breathing, your CO2 levels go up, and (as long as they’re not too high), that correlates with a lower level of activity in the sympathetic nervous system and you experience less pain. Relaxing also reduces our the amount of pain we feel – it’s what yoga teaches us to do and is one of its benefits."
Yoga teacher Katie Broomfield seconds this. "We teach the Yogic breath, a three part breath, into your abdomen, then the chest area, then into the top section of your lungs. You should be breathing deep down, as you did when you were a child. Watch a sleeping baby and you’ll see that they’re breathing right down into their abdomen. I teach this in every lesson I take."
"We’ve forgotten how to breathe," says Chartered Physiotherapist, Sammy Margo. "Part of the issue is that we’re leading increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and experience a lot of stress in our lives. And most of us aren’t doing slow, deep breathing exercises. When you breathe you get an exchange of gases. We breathe in oxygen and nutrients and breathe out carbon dioxide and other substances. If you’re not breathing properly, you aren’t clearing these gases properly. Slow breathing helps us to exchange these gases more effectively, because you tend to breath more deeply.
"And it’s a lot greater than just this," she says. "Doing slow, deep breathing has an effect on your respiratory, circulatory, nervous, digestive, endocrine and urinary systems and on your skin and your mind-body connection. And when you take slow, deep breaths your body relaxes and releases endorphins, the body’s natural opiates."
Robin Monroe recommends learning how to breathe properly from a good Hatha Yoga teacher. "Changing the way you breathe can’t be done just like that, it requires a lot of skills."
First published January 21, 2010
Useful websites
Yoga Biomedical Trust website: www.yogatherapy.org
British Wheel of Yoga website: www.bwy.org.uk