Summary: The last two blogs talked about how breathing deep is good for both the body and mind. To summarise, breath is really the bridge between the body which represents the visible world of matter, and the mind representing the invisible world of energy. In a sense, breath thus symbolises the most famous equation in physics of all time connecting energy to matter, E=mc^2. Thus breath is not just an exchange of gases; but the exchange of energies too. The inhaled air containing fresh oxygen exchanges with exhaled air laden with carbon dioxide produced as cellular waste material. That’s the matter aspect of breath. The energy aspect of fresh breath on the other hand can be sensed in the brain, the gut, and practically every cell in the body in ways that modern science is just beginning to decipher. In a sense, this duality also is like the wave (energy) and particle (matter) duality, the other famous Einsteinian notion that gave birth to quantum mechanics, that makes all technologies of today possible! In this blog, we further delve into how breath is connected to biology with an extreme example of a cell going rogue like cancer, or at another extreme, the everyday distractions of modern technology. We also look into how we can implement slow, deliberate breathing. Thus the theory and practice of breath, invoking the AI of life, is the topic of this blog piece. The ultimate AI of life is actually consciousness, and we shall also start looking at how slower breathing can enliven consciousness.
Diving Deeper Into Breath
To understand breathing better, we need to first understand what happens when we breathe. Breathing, or respiration, is linked inextricably to each of the trillion cells in our body. Like food and water, breath is an essential ingredient of life and one that is needed all the time to remain alive. We can remain alive without food for 30 days, without water for 3 days, but without breath, for barely 3 minutes! Technically, every cell in the body uses oxygen brought in through breath with food extract to produce energy, which is then stored in the energy currency of the body: ATP (adenosine triphosphate). So generally speaking, no breath means no oxygen, which means no energy to remain alive!
Typically, the breathing process is involuntary, subject to the autonomic nervous system, which we reviewed in earlier blogs, that keeps things going steadily without us knowing it. However, this equilibrium can get hijacked leading to a fast, shallow breath eventually resulting in being out of breath, again without being consciously aware. And out of breath means out of time, or abrupt shortening of life or health span in extreme cases. End of life, or death, is preceded by breathlessness, technically called dyspnea especially arising from terminal illness. In our daily lives, when breathing goes wrong on a continuous basis, it can result in diabetes and cardiovascular disease, affect mitochondrial energy production that can cause cancer, influence emotional health unfavourably leading to anxiety and panic attacks, and also affect inflammation, allergies and immunity. Ultimately combining it all, it results in an unhealthy and unhappy life.
However, the good news remains that we can take control of this process into our own hands. Breath is the timekeeper, literally maintaining time in this rapidly accelerating world. It is also the gateway to universal energy that is available in abundance, if only we knew how to harvest it by breathing better. Slow and rhythmic breathing is the only way to boost longevity and health span. Scientific research on the connection between breath rate, the pattern of breath waves, and its awareness with broader physiology, health and happiness is fairly nascent. This will be one of the core areas of work for BreathAI.
Respiration Issues, An Everyday Example
Breathing better while doing any activity avoids abnormal respiration, such as sleep apnea (temporary suspension of breathing, typically during sleep), hyperventilation (shallow and fast breathing leading to breathlessness), and various other abnormalities. Both these abnormalities are increasingly common, and the current solutions are just not adequate as they look at breath very mechanistically, if at all. Like the abnormalities in heart rhythm, which are termed as arrhythmias, abnormal breathing can be a tell-tale sign of a lot of diseases, and far easier to understand and change too.
We can understand this by a simple example in daily life. Let us consider an individual spending a lot of time on Instagram or WhatsApp on mobile. The infinity scroll keeps sending images or group chats to our brain that need to be interpreted and sometimes acted upon by way of putting a thumbs up, smiley emoji or a rebuttal. There are 2 activities happening here, one of perception and the second of action, each of which needs energy, or ATP. Let us remember that 20% of energy used by the entire body is spent by the tiny brain, which weighs less than 2% of overall body mass. Now imagine this so-called passive (supposedly relaxing!) content consumption and interaction activity starts accelerating. Now the brain needs additional energy, or ATPs, to be able to do the additional work. Usually, this is also associated with shallower breath as there is no conscious attempt to breathe deep. This condition, which may characterise 30-40% of the population in our modern life with screens everywhere, is giving rise to unprecedented stress, christened “Tech Apnea”, neuroscientist and author Dr. Tara Swart,
Short or shallow breath reduces the amount of energy harvested in the shortened journey of the breath gases at a time when brain energy consumption has increased, and the brain is always first in the queue. The deficit in the rest of the body’s energy needs leads to readjustment by quickening the heart rate to increase the cardiac output. However, the quickening of heart rate is a typical evolutionary response of our sympathetic system which now assumes that we are priming for fight-or-flight. That leads to cortisol and other stress hormones being secreted, which originally dealt with conflict and life-and-death situations. It also in turn stops activities of digestion and perhaps tissue repair that need the individual to be calm. It is interesting to note that one of the first organs to close down before death is digestion!
Thus, tech apnea hijacks breath harmony, cutting breath short at the chest instead of going deeper into the abdomen. This makes it harder to get oxygen as there is less time and space for gas exchange, which in turn leads to even faster breathing. The body is increasingly in more intense fight-or-flight mode, except that instead of a justified fear of a real tiger, the stimulus here is a perceived fear of an imaginary dragon.
The initial response slowly develops intofull-blown full blown anxiety and panic with shallow and now increasingly faster and uneven breath. For example, people who are extremely angry seem quite on edge, with laboured breathing with visible tightening in facial features!
Respiratory rhythms thus carry traces of a large number of emotional states, which can be recognised as seen in the graph below, from the paper: Respiratory Rhythm, Autonomic Modulation, and the Spectrum of Emotions: The Future of Emotion Recognition and Modulation, which refers to work done in 1970s.
All this is separate from the effects of social media as new tools of addiction or its even more dangerous forms like doomsday scroll. These and other such habits abuse the human mind, the most exquisite machine ever made, by creating artificial satisfactions, dangers, doubts, and worries that are never-ending. One of the defining features of this century is higher breath rates. While 10-15 breaths per minute would have been average in the pre-industrialised world, today 15-20 breaths per minute is the new normal, or abnormal!
Hacking Back The Control
Truly rejuvenating rest is a very deliberate activity as against the energy guzzler of passive mobile watching. Rest enables tapping into the body's powers to heal itself by triggering the parasympathetic nervous system bringing in repair and rejuvenation mode. Human biology is exquisitely programmed to heal itself at the cellular level, however, it needs to activate the repair and rejuvenation mode which is obviously switched off in fight-or-flight, or parasympathetic dominance.
Many other lifestyle factors affect the breathing rate, such as choice of nutrition, posture, etc., through a complex chain of pH levels in the blood determined through CO2 in the blood, oxygen availability, airway resistance etc. For example, junk foods eventually leave us gasping for Oxygen. The conscious choice would have been to instead breathe deep and allow more oxygen to be absorbed in the alveolar exchange of gases. Poor posture, such as text neck, thanks to the ubiquitous gadgets, makes it quite difficult to do ideal diaphragmatic breathing, as the connection between Posture & Breathing is very intimate.
To understand how to regain control of our breath, it is important to understand how the autonomic system automates breathing in the first place. The breathing process varies with respect to rate and depth over time scale, just like heart rate variability (HRV). The variation in breathing is in response to the signals from the brain occurring through autonomic response, the part of the nervous system that works 24/7 in the background. The brain senses the energy or metabolic demands through the change in oxygen and carbon dioxide pressure and pH levels of the blood via the carotid artery in the neck, and accordingly modulates the pulmonary system that controls the muscles leading to respiration. This leads to appropriate breathing patterns to fulfill demands. The metabolic connection of breathing can be easily revealed from various dysregulated metabolic conditions. For example, the difference in the breath rate among the higher body mass index (BMI) people compared to healthier BMI people, or a higher breath rate in stressed individuals or patients with diabetes, etc. Thus, although breath is under autonomic control, after a period of time, this rate gets deranged due to various environmental and lifestyle-related perturbations leading to metabolic inflexibility/dysregulation. The chronic metabolic changes lead to a deranged central breath clock, needing conscious efforts for clock re-calibration. Therefore, conscious efforts to slow the breath rate and enhance the threshold of metabolic sensitivity at the respiratory centre in the brain become paramount to normalise deranged respiration.
Ensuring adequate oxygen availability at the cellular level and the clean up of CO2 waste is linked to brain receptors that understand the relative concentration of O2 & CO2.
How cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability is now coming back into focus after almost 100 years with a Nobel Prize in 2019. As contributor to research that was awarded a Nobel prize recently in this area describes, “Maintenance of cellular O2 Levels is critical because either insufficient or excess O2 leads to increased levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which oxidize lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids, leading to cell dysfunction and death. Thus both the delivery and the consumption of O2 are precisely regulated. Many different molecular mechanisms are utilised to maintain oxygen homeostasis.” Acute, chronic, or degenerative diseases may be speeded up or induced by uncontrolled levels of oxidative stress, eventually resulting in depression. It is also important to remember that CO2 concentration in optimal quantity in blood is equally important to trigger breathing. Thus it is literally round robin in O2 and Co2 being carried into the cell and away by hemoglobin, with both being in optimal range being equally important.
Developing an understanding of time at the cellular level itself is fairly recent, with the Nobel Prize In 2017 for Discoveries of Molecular Mechanisms Controlling the Circadian Rhythm. Further connection of breath to understanding time at the cellular level through certain clock genes is now slowly coming into focus. MINI-REVIEW titled “Out Of Breath, Out of time: Interactions between HIF and Circadian Rhythms” quotes: In primates, a gene expression analysis of 64 tissues found that 82% of protein-coding genes have cyclical expression in at least one tissue (38). Disruption of these rhythms has been linked to disease in humans, including cancer (36), metabolic disease (9), and cardiovascular disease (17). For example, tumour cells in a range of cancers have disrupted the expression of circadian genes, and this is thought to potentially enhance cancer progression (11, 19, 36).
The above bolded 3 form part of the four horsemen of death, as described by Peter Attia, one of the best health podcasters with his Drive podcast; in his book Outlive. One could therefore assume that eventually, all diseases have a component of circadian clock malfunction and hence will have a preventive solution leveraging an appropriate Breath Prescription.
Connection of Cancer, Anxiety, Immunity to Respiration
Usually, the mitochondria, or the energy engine within the cells, are flexible in choosing oxygen utilisation for energy (Oxidative Phosphorylation) or glycolysis, which is non-oxygen energy generation. For efficient energy production, the healthy cell mitochondria mostly choose the former (OXPHOS) pathway. However, in progressive cancer cells, this flexibility disappears (rather hijacked for the shortcut) and the cells choose the less efficient glycolytic pathway. This leads to a relatively higher nutrient uptake by cancer cells as compared to surrounding normal cells. This evades the normal sensing at the cellular level as the additional energy is produced without adequate oxygen (anaerobic metabolism) which also leaves higher corrosive cellular waste, which leads to rapid cancer growth. It's like cancer manages to evade the checks and balances of the brain which are controlled through cellular oxygen need, as excess oxygen need would have alerted the immune system normally.
Respiration in cancer was invented by the famous Warburg effect which received a Nobel prize in the 1930s. This deals with impaired metabolism in cancer cells wherein mitochondrial respiration is affected. This also leaves telltale signs of cancer in exhaled breath, by way of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The cancer cells effectively bypass their need for higher oxygen by higher utilisation of stored glucose, in a process called Glycolysis, and as such evade the immune system, or effectively hack the metabolism to their advantage. This principle is used in PET scans, the confirmatory imaging technique used for cancers typically along with a biopsy of the cells.
Breathing techniques like slow and alternate nostril breathing can make the cells more energy-efficient, thereby resisting the Warburg effect in cancer cells, and increasing the survival of adjacent cells.
Moving onto anxiety, characterised usually by amygdala hijack, and as beautifully written in the referred Harvard Business Review Article: Calming Your Brain During Conflict - we lose control, “In the throes of amygdala hijack, we can’t choose how we want to react because the old protective mechanism in the nervous system does it for us — even before we glimpse that there could be a choice. It is ridiculous.” Episodes of anxiety or panic make the stimulus-to-response process in our brain short-circuit. And the way to deal with this is to first PAUSE, mentally separate perception of stimulus from response by observing the stimulus before labelling, and then consciously choose an appropriate response. All this requires time, a few seconds, before the stress hormones take over. Some calculate it as 3 seconds and some as 6 seconds. Either way, it is too short given the racing thoughts to think of anything else that is more reasonable. The easier way is to do deep diaphragmatic breathing, which calms the fight-or-flight response of the amygdala by triggering the parasympathetic nervous system. It actively inhibits the stress hormone, cortisol, and improves attention.
There are deeper connections of improved breathing with issues of immunity and allergies which are rising as fast as arrhythmias and mental health issues. Immunity can be boosted by the practise of breathwork. Similarly, allergies can be alleviated by better breathing.
How to Practise Deep Slow Breathing
Knowing all the theories of breathing is useless unless one can practise breathing slower and rhythmically.
Learning diaphragmatic breathing, from Harvard Health Publishing from Harvard Medical School states, “To breathe rhythmically means that the in-breath and out-breath occur repeatedly at the same intervals. So if we inhale, counting 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then exhale, counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, then inhale again, counting 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then exhale again, counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6; this establishes rhythm. At the same time, we should invite the breath to be even or smooth, meaning that the volume of the breath stays consistent as it moves in and out, like sipping liquid through a narrow straw. If we manage those two qualities for just a few minutes, the breath assists us in remaining present, making it possible to stay with intense sensation in the body.”
Doing this from the belly leads slowly to slow-paced inspiration and coherence in breath, in turn bringing coherence in the heart, improving both breath rate/profile and HRV bringing resonance.
As for diaphragmatic breathing, this same Harvard Health article does a good step-by-step introduction on how to BREATHE DEEPLY.
Here's how to do it:
Lie on your back on a flat surface (or in bed) with your knees bent. You can use a pillow under your head and your knees for support, if that's more comfortable.
Place one hand on your upper chest and the other on your belly, just below your rib cage.
Breathe in slowly through your nose, letting the air in deeply, towards your lower belly. The hand on your chest should remain still, while the one on your belly should rise.
Tighten your abdominal muscles and let them fall inward as you exhale through pursed lips. The hand on your belly should move down to its original position.
You can also practise this sitting in a chair, with your knees bent and your shoulders, head, and neck relaxed. Practise for 5 to 10 minutes, several times a day if possible.
The above are of course very very basic level descriptions, inhalation and exhalation, progressively slower and deeper. Additional features can be alternating the nostrils consciously and breath-hold, outside or inside the body. A detailed assessment of this entire cycle can be done in a breath profile, and various features of that can be analysed with breath prescriptions to lead to a new paradigm of preventive health. Before problems surface in the physical world of the body, they will invariably show up in the energy world and can be identified via breath.
BreathAI website (www.thebreathai.com) and the mobile app will have videos and courses for bringing together slower and more conscious breathing. Our initial experiments suggest that exhaling longer and using alternate nostrils are probably the easiest ways to bring down breath rate, improve breath profile, and boost heart rate variability, leading to being in equilibrium or centre, and potentially getting rid of any dis-ease!
Breath & Consciousness
Ultimately, breath is an expression of life energy, which is beyond matter. It is proven that breathing at rates less than 10 breaths per minute has immense benefits, and in times to come, this shall slowly be connected to all diseases, one by one. While the air all organisms breathe is the same, humans are special because of their ability to have an erect posture and abdominal breathing. That may be the reason for its unique ability to think and enliven consciousness. Most of the challenges of modern life are due to not living consciously, whether while eating, sleeping, talking, or every other activity. Being conscious of the energy that gives life to matter is possible instantaneously only through awareness of breath. Hence, being in the present moment, every moment, is the path to reaching the source of life, the consciousness. Consciousness is also seen in many physical forms; so activities that help, feel, or heal others lead to the rising of this energy within us. Thus empathy, random acts of kindness, and compassion help us ultimately. Being in peace and quietening breath to the power of it becoming almost absent can lead to heightened consciousness. This along with the features of nasal switching as the timekeeper of the intricate clock of the circadian rhythm controlled in the hypothalamus, the centre of the autonomic nervous system including breath, will be dealt with in the next blog!
Today happens to be World Mental Health Day, and this post is dedicated to making the world happy and joyful. BreathAI hopes to contribute to this journey by better understanding stress and breathing practices.
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