I listened to a podcast last year that blew me away. It was the first time I’d heard someone so clearly articulate the biological under-pinnings of breathwork in such a potent way so I wanted to capture my notes and share with you.
You’ll find a link to the podcast at the end of this post. Niraj’s deep dive into the biology of breathwork starts at 48:48.
Additionally, Siddhi Yoga asked me to link to their post on a variety of different breath-work practices, called Pranayama. They do a nice job of detailing different practices and offering courses to go deeper across yoga, ayurveda, and meditation. Check their article out here.
Here’s some quick neuroscience before we get started…
The Autonomic Nervous System
Our autonomic nervous system (ANS) regulates heart rate, breathing, blood flow and other key bodily functions without us having to think about it. Hence why it's called the autonomic (or automatic).
Our ANS has two main divisions, the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic nervous systems. As the ANS receives information about the body and the external environment, it responds by stimulating bodily processes (usually through the sympathetic division) or by inhibiting them (usually through the parasympathetic division).
Most of the clusters of nerve cells for the sympathetic division are located just outside both sides of the spinal cord while most of our nerve clusters for the parasympathetic division are located near or in the organs they connect with.
The autonomic nervous system controls body processes like the following:
Blood pressure
Heart and breathing rates
Body temperature
Digestion
Metabolism (thus affecting body weight)
The balance of water and electrolytes (such as sodium and calcium)
The production of body fluids (saliva, sweat, and tears)
Urination
Defecation
Sexual response
Some organs are controlled solely by one or the other while some are affected by both systems.
Dual Control
Pupil dilation
Salivary production
Airway dilation
Heart rate
Digestion
Intestinal secretion
Voiding (Using the toilet)
Sympathetic Control (Fight or Flight)
Constricts blood vessels
Stimulates sweat
Stimulates glucose production
Stimulates adrenals
Stimulates orgasm
Stimulates ejaculation
Niraj’s Talk
When you inhale, you stimulate the sympathetic nervous system.
When you exhale, you stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system.
Whichever one your breath favors, that's the one you're stimulating more. So when we sing or chant or Om or sigh, we are relaxing ourselves.
When we take big long gulps of air and hold them in (like diving under water), we're exciting ourselves.
Breathing Methods
If you know how to inhale and hold your breath in the right way, you can stimulate a positive stress response in the body where you create a short burst of adrenaline, which has an anti-inflammatory effect.
Using Mula Bundha (root lock) & breath retention, we can start to heal the body of inflammation.
When you breathe in a rhythm, you create physiological harmony. When you're breathing in and out for equal intervals, you create a balance in the body that can have a dramatic impact as your (a) brain waves move from Beta to Alpha and (b) your heart rate variability flows into coherence. Coherence optimizes the flow of blood to your brain.
Rhythmic breathing can also be weighted towards one side. IE You can breathe rhythmically with a two count inhale and a four count exhale to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system more.
Oxygen & Carbon Dioxide
You inhale air that's comparatively oxygen-rich, and exhale air that's comparatively carbon-dioxide rich.
Oxygen is the fuel for the fire that's going on inside you. This inner fire exists in the mitochondria - the power plants of our cells. Adding oxygen to the mitochondria is like adding air to a fire - it helps the fire breathe and grow.
If we have too MUCH oxygen though, the body, the fire burns too bright. It can cause damage called oxidative stress on the body, which leads to oxidative damage on the cells, and can lead to free radical damage.
If we have too LITTLE oxygen, then the fire stops burning and your energy levels drop.
So we need the right BALANCE, and this is where pranayama (energy control) comes in.
So Pranayama, and yoga more broadly, is about becoming more efficient with oxygen so that we use the least amount of oxygen possible. The reason is that extra oxygen creates stress on the body. The belief is the less you breathe, the longer you live.
Harvard has done studies on oxygen and its effects on your blood vessels - if you have too much oxidative stress, you end up with something akin to "rusting" in the body.
Yoga
Yoga trains each muscle and cell of your body to become stronger and more resilient to stress and to require less oxygen.
In yoga, we use breath control (or simply conscious breathing) to slow the rate of oxygen down with each asana where you are holding each pose beyond the comfort zone. And because you're holding a muscle in static contraction, there is reduced blood flow to the muscle that's being contracted.
When this happens, the cells of the muscle are forced to use whatever nutrients are stored there. And when it does that to exhaustion, it adapts and changes to become more resilient. It grows back stronger and more efficient at using oxygen. The body produces more myoglobin, better blood flow, more capillaries, and better circulation around the body.
Kumbhaka
This leads us to one of the most important techniques in pranayama called Kumbhaka. Kumbhaka (kuhm-BAH-kah) is Sanskrit word that means pot. This is not just any pot but the human torso as seen as a pot with two interiors (one at the throat and the other at the base of the pelvis).
The root of Kumbhaka is extended rhythmic breathing with breath retention in between the inhale and the exhale.
How to do Kumbhaka - Full Breath Retention from YogaTeket
When you hold your breath beyond a certain point...
You create a state called intermittent hypoxia, where the oxygen saturation in your blood drops below 85% for a brief amount of time. This triggers your body to respond physiologically to having less oxygen. It produces more red blood cells, increases blood flow, grows new capillaries, and if you do it for the right amount of time, with the right dose of hypoxia, you wake up STEM cells.
Stem cells are the magical cells in our body that can transform into any other cells... and they hate oxygen. They can only exist in low oxygen environments so they are typically found in bone marrow and specific tissues that use up all the oxygen around them.
When stem cells wake up, they automatically go to areas where repair is needed. They go to inflammation sites and they reduce the inflammation and create restoration or they actually turn into other cells to grow new vessels or new parts of tissues.
So if you become very good at holding your breath for a certain length of time, you'll wake up stem cells and increase blood flow to your brain. You actually wake up dormant parts of your brain and you can move stem cells there using Yogic techniques.
This can lead to an overall anti-aging effect on the body, and can allow you to stimulate neurogenesis. And more importantly, you can use this to stimulate neurogenesis in places where you direct it, which Niraj calls “directed neurogenesis.”
Conclusion
There's a study where they took two groups of people. One group played a piece of music on a physical instrument. The other group just visualized playing the music, note by note.
They mapped the brain of each group, and found that both groups had the same changes in their brain. Demonstrating that intention and visualization were enough to stimulate the growth of brain cells in specific areas.
So yogis develop these deeper practices - these advanced yoga rituals with pranayama breathing techniques to invoke brain change to…
create higher abilities and mental faculties
increase cognitive function
develop resilience to stress
survive longer in low oxygen environments
Hence why so many yogis and monks have migrated to the Himalayas - living in very low oxygen environments because they know oxygen can become detrimental to health if you don't make friends with it.
So let me say that again because I think it’s such a fascinating idea. Research shows that parts of our brain develop based solely on visualization, intention, and repetition in contrast to actual physical practice. This opens the doorway to the idea that yogis and deep meditators who concentrate long and hard enough are able to develop unique skills that do not exist in other human beings because there is no physical way to practice them.
The full talk is below, and the scientific explanation starts around 48:48.