Slow down your breathing

Is 6 breaths a minute the optimum?

Image: bioworld.com

‘If in doubt, breathe out,’ is excellent advice for situations that make us uncertain about our next response.  This is not exactly a new message.  Many meditative and prayer traditions encourage us to slow down our breathing rate.

What happens when we breathe slowly? We nudge the switch of our nervous system from the Sympathetic to the Parasymathetic.  From Fight or Flight to Tend & Mend (or Be-friend).

How slow is slow breathing?  A line of research has aimed to identify the rate producing resonance between the wave forms of our breathing and of our heart (imagine smooth and integrated swells instead of these waves throwing up choppy confusion).  ‘When breathing at resonance frequency, heart, respiratory, and blood pressure rhythms become highly synchronised, and heart rate variability substantially increases,’ writes Jaakko Erkkila in a review.

The breathing rate that contributes to that depends on the individual –typically, Erkkila continues,  ‘between 4.5 and 6.5 breaths/min in adults.’

If you can’t afford the assessment to find the breathing rate that will produce your unique resonance frequency, there is good evidence that getting below 10 breaths per minute (bpm) is helpful. 

Andrea Zaccaro reviewed 15 studies using this breathing rate cut-off – and reports central nervous system benefits including more alpha brain waves, and emotional positives (less arousal, anger, anxiety and depression; more relaxation, vigor and alertness). 

Hessan Jafari trained his 48 subjects to breathe at 6 bpm – with demonstrated improvement in their ability to tolerate pain. 

Xiao Ma taught 40 subjects (employees of an IT firm) long, slow diaphramatic breathing.  They were encouraged to go below 6 bpm, and achieved an average 4 bpm.  These folk demonstrated more sustained attention, lower cortisol levels and a reduction in negative affect as a function of their practice.

Could this be how meditation and prayer works?  Luciano Bernardi and colleagues had 23 participants recite the Ave Maria and a Buddhist mantra (“om-mani-padme-hum” roughly, ‘the jewel in the lotus’) as well as doing regular 6 bpm breathing (not all at the same time).  Repetition of the prayer and the mantra settled breathing to a consistent pattern of 6 bpm.  Bernardi reported ‘striking, powerful, and synchronous increases in existing cardiovascular rhythms when [prayer and mantra were] recited six times a minute.’

Those that regularly use this prayer or this mantra typically use sets of 100 or 150 – between 17 and 25 minute sessions.

Try the mantra or the prayer, or use a metronome or ticking clock to fit your breathing into something like 6 bpm (10 seconds for each breath cycle).

Once you’ve got that down, try counting the seconds during defined periods so you are able to bring slow breathing into your daily life.  I try it while doing a plank, and in between talking in social settings.  Or get up, stretch, take deep relaxed breaths and flood your body with oxygen.

As musician Igor Bezget puts it; “slow it down so you can play it fast ... practice in a slow and exact tempo so it feels comfortable and natural, then increase to performance tempo.”

Stewart Forsyth is an organisational psychologist and executive coach and also the author of 21 Remarkable People – available from Amazon or Apple or other eBook sources.