Five breathing exercises that can have a lasting impact on your health

Rooted in ancient practices, the modern science of breathwork is revealing how a few minutes spent focusing on your breathing can not only bring an instant dose of stress relief, but also benefit your health in the long term.

Breathing is the first and the last thing we do in life. It's a largely subconscious activity which our body carries out many times per minute in order to keep us alive and thriving. Yet an emerging realm of science is demonstrating that sometimes our bodies benefit from a little help to do it optimally.

This is the field of breathwork, an ancient art that has been practiced by different cultures for millennia. It ranges from techniques such as Indian pranayama, which looks to connect the mind and body by methods such as breathing through one nostril at a time, to Chinese qigong. 

The overriding theme is that a more mindful approach to breath control, even if carried out for just a few minutes per day, can help calm and relax the body, with both immediate and long-term benefits.

"I like to describe breathwork as an ancient practice that is resurging in the modern day as the new mindfulness hack," says Abbie Little, a researcher in theoretical psychology and medicine at Griffith University in Australia.

Pregnant women or people with respiratory illnesses such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, should use caution before trying breathwork and consult with a medical professional. Both these groups have been excluded from previous breathwork or breathing exercise trials. However, there are thought to be many people who can potentially benefit.

A few small changes can help lower stress hormones in healthy people, while for those living with chronic health conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, breathwork can improve symptoms and lower inflammation. For most of us, small tweaks to the rate, rhythm and regularity of breathing can make an immediate difference.

So how can you begin to reap the benefits? The BBC takes a closer look at the fast-developing science of breathwork – and breaks down five different breathwork techniques you can try yourself.

The science of de-stressing

There is a growing body of evidence that breathwork can offer a new way of managing stress. Chronic stress is a pivotal driver of many age-related disorders, along with mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. For people who are already battling illnesses such as breast cancer as well as other cancers, levels of stress hormones such as cortisol can worsen prognosis and accelerate disease progression, while research shows that it can also accelerate the ageing process. 

"We've studied cortisol levels in women with advanced breast cancer, and found that abnormal patterns of diurnal cortisol [the daily cycle of cortisol production], can predict how much longer people are going to live," says David Spiegel, professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University in the US.

But while breathwork has a long and storied past, our modern understanding of the underlying science is only just beginning. One recent paper summarising the available evidence, noted that more than half of all studies on the subject have been published in the last six years, and Little says that researchers are still trying to pin down the precise methods and aspects which are most effective.

However, scientists have already been able to draw a number of conclusions.

To begin with, there is an emerging school of thought that many of us are breathing too quickly. "We all tend to hyperventilate, breathing too fast and not very effectively," says Spiegel, with hyperventilation typically defined as taking more than 15 breaths per minute. Secondly, some people also predominantly breathe through their mouths, a habit which can begin in children before progressing into adulthood. (Read more about the benefits of nose breathing over mouth breathing.) 

Spiegel says that one of the benefits of breathwork is akin to hypnosis, meditation and other mind-body practices, requiring you to focus inwards and disassociating you from everything else happening in your life. When it comes to hypnosis, he says that the effects of this have even be seen on MRI scans, with one study showing that it tones down neural activity in the brain's inner alarm system – a region known as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex – which is activated by stress.

"There are different breathing patterns that are sometimes associated with some of the meditation practices," he says. "The idea is that you're being open to your body,........

© BBC