Chest Breathing - The Silent Killer
The way you breathe is slowly tanking every aspect of your health without you even realizing it!
Chest breathing is a silent killer. It spikes stress, wrecks digestion & weakens our performance - yet most of us don’t realize we are GUILTY of it!
97% of people go about their everyday lives completely unaware of their breathing habits.
They have grown so used to physically feeling bad that it has become “normal” to them.
This sound familiar?
• High stress levels
• Hard time digesting after eating
• Winded from moderate activity that didn’t used to get you so winded
• Poor sleep night after night despite going to bed at a reasonable hour
Our breath has EVERYTHING to do with this!
The average person breathes anywhere between 12-20 breaths per minute. That’s A LOT of breaths & they are very fast/shallow.
Our breathing habits have become so bad that our unconscious breathing has defaulted to shallow mouth breathing! (Into the chest - no diaphragm activation)
Your breath is directly linked to your nervous system via your lungs. The lungs are broken up into lobes. The left lung has 2 lobes and the right lung has 3 lobes.
We won’t deep dive into this in this post BUT - the upper lobes are linked to your Sympathetic Nervous System & the lower lobes are linked to your Parasympathetic Nervous System.
Remember those shallow chest breaths we talked about earlier?
Those breaths are constantly stimulating that sympathetic nervous system! (The nickname for our sympathetic nervous system is the “Fight or Flight” system)
We are only meant to be in that fight or flight mode when necessity calls for it (because being in that mode releases hormones like adrenaline, cortisol, etc. to help us handle the stressful situation)… But our breathing habits have wired our brains & bodies to constantly be in fight mode.
Taking full, deep nasal breaths is the ONLY way to get the air down to the lower lobes of your lungs to activate your parasympathetic nervous system (rest & relaxation).
When you breathe fully & deeply using your nose & engaging your diaphragm that same air you take in is going to signal to your body it’s time to rest instead of signaling your body that it is TIME TO FIGHT!
The parasympathetic nervous system influences and aids our digestion, it lowers our heart rate, it even helps produce saliva (woo no dry mouth).
Even further than that, our brain won’t be releasing those fight or flight hormones that are making us chronically stressed over time.
We ALL know that chronic stress literally KILLS us over time. It increases our susceptibility to nearly all health problems.
So how do we fix this? You just apply some elbow grease to it.
Consciously sit down every day to just breathe in and out of YOUR NOSE. Inhale using your “belly”.
Do this as a practice & then during your regular daily life, start correcting yourself when you notice yourself shallowly mouth breathing!
If you approach your breathing with an “out of sight out of mind” mentality it’s very hard to correct our bad breathing habits.
So we sit down daily & practice & then it becomes easier to notice in our daily lives & fix it over the course of time.
Consistent use of your nasal airways widens them over time. This makes it easier to breathe through your nose.
THIS IS WHY we must be diligent in training our nose. We have to do all we can to allow it to function as intended. It just needs a daily reminder.
Do you snore at night? Wake up in the morning still groggy? Have a hard time using your nose to breathe?
The solution is very simple, just shift your focus towards Beginning Breath.
Beginning Breath contains nearly an HOUR of video instruction teaching you the basics of breathing health.
In the course you:
Learn how your respiratory system works
Learn how to use your nose to boost your energy levels, focus, improve sleep quality and boost your immune system functioning.
Receive a 30 day plan for you to follow along to BUILD YOUR FIRST BREATHING PRACTICE.
Learn how to leverage “Resonant Breathing” (the simplest, yet most effective technique) to train yourself to be a nasal dominant breather.