Diaphragm breathing just might be the elusive fountain of youth. When it comes to mind, body, and spirit, it’s impossible to deny the genius of diaphragm breathing.
Every health journey should start with breath. Well, it’s obvious that you have to breathe to be alive, but it’s the quality of your breathing that makes a difference in your health and adds quality years to your life.
Either make your cells do the happy dance with loads of oxygen, or you’ll have a bunch of angry cells unable to do their job. They’ll make signs on sticks saying, “Oxygen is Life!” and start chanting, “Without breath, we’ll give you death!” Or, something like that. So be careful, the neighbors will complain. [1]
Diaphragm Breathing Mechanics
The diaphragm is a dome-shaped organ that sits near the bottom of your rib cage, below your chest, and above all your digestive organs. As you inhale, your diaphragm contracts, and when it does, it flattens and fans outward, pressing down.
This movement isn’t visible on the outside of your body. You know this awesome muscle is doing its job because as it contracts and pulls down, your stomach, intestines, and other organs in your abdomen extend slightly outward.
Belly breathing! Well, not really. Your tummy expanding is the effect, not the cause. Puffing out your belly, and proclaiming you’re belly breathing, isn’t exactly effective. You may have to do some visualizing to find your diaphragm and connect with the specific movement.
How to Mess Up Breathing
Which is just crazy when you think about it. We’ve been breathing forever. You’d think we’d mastered it by now. We humans mess up our bodies all the time. We hold in our tummies and think we’re making a strong core, and looking sexy while we’re doing it. Nah. We’ve wrecked our natural breathing mechanisms.
Our lifestyles don’t help much either. All that shallow, upper chest and mouth breathing has retrained our bodies in a nasty way. And sitting? Holy mackerel! Sitting is harmful in so many ways, and one is by smooshing all our organs and cramming our tall, proud breathing parts into a scrunched, sad lump. For hours and hours and hours.
How Does Diaphragm Breathing Work?
When you relearn how to breathe using your diaphragm, you’ll see it’s a flowing, wave-like movement. Start by inhaling, contracting your diaphragm, and pulling air to your lung’s bottom-most portion. Then your middle chest (thoracic) area contracts and fills the middle section, and finally your upper (clavicle) area expands and fills with air. It’s smooth. Again, like a gentle wave. Avoid thinking in stages so much that you breathe with a three-beat staccato rhythm.
This breathing container is not a fixed or rigid cavity. It’s an incredible expanding and contracting container, and this is important to remember. If any of your muscles are tight, in any body part, this can cause tightness in your thoracic cavity. Because your body systems are all connected, even tight calf muscle or a headache can change your breathing, by restricting the ability to expand.
When the diaphragm contracts, the small muscles between your ribs, raise your rib cage. This causes an expansion in your rib cage, extending out side to side and front to back. The diaphragm contraction makes room from top to bottom. Side to side, front to back, top to bottom–the thoracic cavity expands.
On the exhale, relaxing the diaphragm, rib cage, and chest, causes the air to release out. Easy peasy! Then why is it so hard? It takes retraining your body, moving more, improving your posture, and practice.
Why is this Important?
Why is this expansion important? Good question. Gold star, right there.
When your thoracic cavity expands, and your diaphragm pulls down, you create more room. The chest becomes a larger container. Maybe you remember from high school science, but air abhors a vacuum, and that’s exactly what happens. Same amount of volume, larger space, low pressure.
Air comes to fill the void created by low pressure. The atmosphere pushes air into your body.
Air is breathed into you.
You don’t pull air in, or force yourself to breathe. You make room for the breath. When done correctly, your lungs fill with rich, scrumptious oxygen.
Diaphragm Breathing Benefits
Body
Diaphragm breathing affects every itsy-bitsy piece of your miraculous body in some way. The interconnectivity of the human body is mind-blowing. Deep breathing has a healthy influence on posture, organ function, pelvis, mouth, cervical spine, vascular and lymphatic systems, and heart – just to just get started. [2] But, below are some of the biggies.
Oxygen
Breathing oxygenates your cells, processes waste, and calms your mind. In order for all your cells to be well-supplied, you need to get as much oxygen-rich air as you can.
Mouth breathing guarantees shallow breathing. By recruiting only the upper chest muscles, and even your neck and back, to breathe, mouth breathing creates shallow and rapid breathing.
When you breathe through your nose, your body turns on your diaphragm switch and concentrates down deep where the best breathing happens.
Deep in your lungs, towards the bottom, the blood tends to congregate. Thanks to gravity. When you breathe with your diaphragm, through your nose, the air heads straight for the basement, and all the blood hanging out down there gets the oxygen it needs. From there your body transports the oxygen-laden blood throughout the rest of your beautiful self.
Core Strength and Posture
All the pressure generated by your diaphragm for breathing helps strengthen your core including your spine. If you are lifting weights or rearranging the living room for the twelfth time, use a diaphragm breath just before lifting and you can help protect and stabilize your trunk.
Organ Massage
I just love this. Think about it, as you’re breathing deeply using your diaphragm all the organs lying below it get a rollicking good massage. These organs, including your liver, stomach, and intestines, are getting squeezed and released like a sponge. The rolling, kneading action of breathing keeps blood, fluids, and oxygen exchange pumping, and helps with digestion and elimination. Yay!
Heart
If tummy organ massaging weren’t awesome enough, deep breathing also massages your heart. Ahhhh.
The diaphragm is connected to the central tendon (a strong cord that extends upwards). The central tendon is connected to the pericardium – the sac that holds the heart. As the diaphragm contracts and flattens during an inhale, it pulls slightly on this tendon and gives our loving heart the hug it deserves.
As part of the plan of care for heart failure patients, many doctors prescribe diaphragm breathing exercises. And it’s working. You don’t have to wait for a heart crisis to start. It also lowers heart rate and blood pressure. So, start today! I mean, you have to breathe anyway, right?
Mind
Breathing is part of your automatic nervous system (sympathetic and parasympathetic system of fight-or-flight or calm-and-restore) which regulates, digestion, breathing rate, metabolic processes, body temperature, blood pressure, and so much more. Including cortisol production.
The more the sympathetic nervous system is on alert, the more cortisol is produced. The more cortisol sticks around in your body, for no good reason, the more damage is done. Two of the big damages are inflammation and stress. And you want to give out-of-control inflammation and stress the boot.
Stress will hurt your mind and brain. Unmanaged chronic stress, lurking around in the background of day-to-day life, will destroy your body from the inside out, and really mess with your mind. Anxiety, depression, moodiness, and sleep disruption are common.
Taking deep breaths, using your diaphragm, regulates your nervous system and engages the parasympathetic system and helps your body to restore and find balance.
Spirit
I’m going to get all woo-woo on you for a moment. If that isn’t your thing, you can skip this part, but I’d love for you to hear me out.
Breath means spirit. Literally. And I think this bears some pause and reflection.
Remember from above, you don’t breathe air, air is breathed into you. You create space for it to happen by enlarging your body’s space.
You make room for spirit.
No matter which religion you practice, you can see where this can be a beautiful and full-heart experience. Taking it even one step further, you can see where it can become almost a prayer. This is an enriching take on the breath and adds even more power to the practice of both breathing and mediation.
The Takeaway
You can breathe without thinking about it, but if you begin to breathe with awareness, your entire life can change. You’ll experience an understanding of how mind, body, and spirit come together. Diaphragm breathing is the force that makes it happen.
Have you tried diaphragm breathing? How did it make a difference for you?
[1] One of my favorite books, Grow Younger Daily by Eric Franklin goes in-depth on using imagery and visualization as a tool for cell health. When I’ve used the images of cells as breathing individuals, lighting up like candles, dancing, and as party guests bringing gifts, I have seen profound results. And it’s fun!
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4827708/
