What Your Breathing Says About You - Episode 1

When the Breath Reveals the Invisible

You are sitting on your sofa, the day is over and you are settled comfortably at home.

But...

Your shoulders are tense, your jaw is clenched, and you feel that your chest never seems to fully relax.

And yet there is no danger, no one is chasing you, you are safe…

So you take a deeper breath, then another, and another still...

As if something in you were trying to find a little space, without quite managing to.

As if you instinctively knew that your breathing had a direct impact on you, but had never truly believed it.

And also because you have heard it a thousand times, because it is probably one of the most repeated pieces of advice in the world:

“ Breathe deeply ”

Stressed?        Breathe!

Anxious?        Breathe!

Angry?            Breathe!

As if the breath were a universal remedy, a simple answer to problems that are often infinitely more complex.

We spend our lives breathing, more than 20,000 times a day, without effort, without conscious decision, without even noticing it.

Yet we never really question what breathing truly is, because it is automatic and natural.

And it is the moment something goes wrong, when we feel a tightness in the chest, a sense of running out of air, shallow breathing, a sigh that keeps coming back, or a vague feeling that the body can never quite let go…

That we begin to observe this breath which, until then, seemed to go without saying.

“ And what if this breathing were not only a biological mechanism meant to keep our organism alive? ”

“ And what if it also said something about us? ”

Not about our personality.

Not about our opinions.

But about the way our organism has learned to move through the world.

Breathing as if the danger were still there

Breathing is not merely a gas exchange. It is also one of the most faithful indicators of the state of the nervous system.

When the organism perceives a threat, real or not, it immediately sets off a cascade of reactions.

The endocrinologist Hans Selye, in the 1930s, was one of the first to formalise this mechanism under the name general adaptation syndrome: alarm, resistance, exhaustion.

And among all the adjustments the body then makes, breathing holds a central place. It speeds up. It moves towards the upper chest. It becomes more discreet, as if not to betray a presence.

This reaction is perfectly normal. It has saved countless ancestors faced with predators or conflicts. It is even remarkably effective.

The trouble is that the threats we face today no longer resemble a tiger springing from the thicket.

They are professional deadlines, relational tensions, financial worries, the chronic feeling of having to manage too much with too little. And even when the conscious mind knows perfectly well that all is fine, the organism does not always receive the message.

The body then continues to operate according to a logic of vigilance.

Not because it is faulty, but because it has adapted. And adaptations have this peculiarity: they often outlive the circumstances that made them necessary.

That is probably why some people never manage to fully relax their shoulders.

Why others sigh without even realising it.

Why some organisms breathe as though they had to stay ready — to react, to anticipate, to manage — even when there is nothing left to manage.

And what if we had not learned to breathe badly?

And what if we had simply learned to breathe in a way consistent…

…with the world as our nervous system has learned to perceive it?

Four breathing signatures

No two breaths are alike. And depending on the underlying state in which an organism has settled, the breath takes on different forms — sometimes caricatural, sometimes very subtle, but always revealing.

• The anxious breath.

Fast, short, located in the upper chest. The diaphragm barely moves, the shoulders rise.

There is often a feeling of running out of air, even though oxygenation is perfectly normal. Sighs are frequent, like so many small attempts at a reset.

This breath is the classic signature of chronic sympathetic activation: the organism is wired in flight-ready mode, permanently.

• The collapsed breath.

Conversely, slow, flat, shallow. The breath seems resigned, as if the vital impulse itself had withdrawn.

It is often the signature of depressive states or great emotional fatigue.

The body no longer mobilises enough energy to breathe fully, as if it had given up.

• The watchful breath.

Discreet. Held back. Often unconscious. The person does not even know they are slightly blocking their breath.

The diaphragm stays tense, ready.

This signature appears in people who have long lived in an environment where they had to be constantly on guard: not to make noise, not to disturb, not to draw attention.

• The frozen breath.

Rarer, deeper in its origin. The breath suspends itself in micro-episodes, sometimes without the person being aware of it.

It is a signature found in certain post-traumatic states, where part of the nervous system learned, very early, that it was better not to breathe at all so as not to be noticed.

None of these four forms is abnormal.

They are all intelligent solutions the organism has put in place.

To survive, to adapt, to get through what it had to get through.

The trouble begins when yesterday’s solution becomes today’s prison.

The breath as a dashboard

Breathing sits at a particular crossroads.

It is one of the rare automatic functions on which we can also act voluntarily.

We decide neither our heart rate, nor our blood pressure, nor the way our kidneys filter the blood. But our breathing, yes — we can slow it down, speed it up, hold it, release it.

As if nature had left a doorway towards something that usually works without us.

And each time the inner state changes, breathing changes with it.

But the reverse is just as true: each time breathing changes, it in turn sends information to the rest of the organism.

In other words, breathing is not only the reflection of your state. It takes part in building it.

That is what explains why a sigh of relief genuinely feels good.

Why blocked breathing almost always accompanies worry.

Why a long exhalation sometimes releases something we could not even name.

In this respect, breathing resembles a thermostat more than a thermometer.

It does not merely indicate the state of the system.

It can help to change it.

Before wanting to change

You have probably noticed, while reading these lines, how you are breathing right now.

That is normal: attention modifies the object of attention.

But before trying to correct anything, there is a step too often forgotten: to observe.

Not to judge, nor to repair, nor to understand.

Sit down, for a minute.

Just one.

And simply observe your breath.

Is it fast or slow?

High in the chest, or deep in the belly?

Regular, or punctuated by small pauses?

Rather nasal, rather through the mouth?

What you observe will tell you about your inner state of the moment more precisely than many questionnaires.

And already, through this attention alone, something may perhaps begin to shift.

But not in the direction one usually expects.

Because what follows is counter-intuitive.

The more one tries to breathe better, the more one sometimes sustains the problem.