Just Breathe
Take a moment and tune in to your body to bring attention to your breathing. What is the rate of your breathing? What is the depth? Are you breathing through your nose or your mouth? Does the air fill your belly or your chest? Do your shoulders rise with each breath, or stay relaxed? Does your inhale or exhale last longer?
Did your breathing change as you were paying attention to it? Now, think about the fact that for most of your day, you weren’t even thinking about breathing. There are a lot of automatic systems and controls in our body to keep the oxygen coming in, but one of the unique parts of our respiratory system is that we can override the reflexive (automatic) control and take voluntary control. This isn’t true of most essential body functions; we can’t voluntarily change our heart or blood pressure for example.
Our breathing is controlled by a very unique muscle, called the diaphragm. The diaphragm is a dome-shaped muscle that sits below our lungs and heart. It makes attachments into the bottom of your sternum, the lower ribs, and to the front of the vertebrae in the mid back. When the diaphragm contracts, it drops down and like the plunger of a syringe it creates a vacuum in the thoracic cavity. This draws the lungs open and pulls air in. Then the diaphragm relaxes, and elastic recoil pushes air back out (we can force air out with other muscles, but in relaxed breathing exhalation is passive).
Now, we tuned in to our breathing earlier and realized that most of the time our breathing is under reflexive control. If you read our previous post “Get on your Nerves” we learned that our sympathetic, or “fight or flight” response, is part of our autonomic nervous system. Under stress, our diaphragm is increasing activity, tightening, and we recruit extra respiratory muscles to maximize oxygen intake. This is at the expense of shallower and more rapid breathing and tightening of the diaphragm muscle. When the diaphragm tightens it can often present as mid-back pain and may wrap around the ribs as well.
Luckily, we were given the control to override our reflexes in our breathing. This is where conscious breathing exercises can help. Focusing on deep inhalation into the belly, followed by full exhalation with relaxation of shoulders and back on the exhale can start to reduce diaphragm tension. A number of stretches can help to alleviate diaphragm tension as well. This is an important practice for those who work in stressful environments or those who push their body hard physically. Our body doesn’t differentiate between mental and physical stress when stimulating these responses.
The big takeaways here are that we can take control of our breathing and reduce our diaphragm tension to both reduce pain and improve our ability to relax after stressful stimulation. We take an average of about 20,000 breaths a day. Having full diaphragmatic mobility not only can reduce pain but can improve organ health through increased mobilization, increase oxygenation, increase our athletic performance, and improve our rest and sleep. Start tuning in to your breathing and see what kinds of changes you can make. As always, if you have recurrent pain or want more guidance, Integrity Physical Therapy can tailor a program to you through a thorough evaluation.
