Seven ways to breathe better and boost your mood and health

Yes all of us do it all day long, but a few simple tweaks to the way we breathe can have a huge impact on our health – both mental and physical.

Jenafer Matthews' story is becoming a familiar one. Having striven to get herself into a fast-paced career she found herself young, successful and barely able to stay awake past 8pm. She was on high alert at work and completely exhausted outside of it. "Wired and tired," she told Seven Sharp.

That was four years ago. Matthews took a deep dive into learning about her health which eventually led her to the core of the matter – her breath which, throughout her frantic days, was fast and shallow. “I didn’t understand at the time that the breath is the bridge between the mind and the nervous system," she says. Now armed with that knowledge, Matthews has created a new role (and life) for herself. She teaches breathing and mindfulness courses to corporate groups, helping stressed out professionals like her former self avoid the burnout she experienced.

The fact that our mind and our breath work together in an inextricable feedback loop is well understood by "the lung mechanic" Catherine George. She's been a respiratory physiotherapist for more than 20 years and, while her CV is laden with medical credentials, she doesn't downplay the key role of the mind in enhancing calm effective breathing – and vice versa.

In her practice, treating everything from anxiety to asthma to long Covid, George sees plenty of the wrong type of breathing. "We Westerners, we’re useless at breathing essentially," she tells Seven Sharp. Our daily lives don’t match how our stress response is designed."

Basically, we sit at our desks and breathe like we're running from a sabre-toothed tiger. It creates havoc with our nervous systems and in turn leads to more gasping for air. But there are simple steps to stop that cycle.

And with our breath affecting everything from mood to brain focus to blood pressure, the cariovascular system, even our joints, breathing is a good thing to get right. Catherine George shared some tips:

It sounds silly, says George, but holding your tongue in the correct part of the mouth is where good breathing begins. “Your tongue should be held lightly on the roof of your mouth with the tip touching the back of your teeth.” This position causes you to relax your jaw, and an unclenched jaw decreases stress. Also, the tongue held this way blocks the mouth as a breathing passage, ensuring we employ the far superior nose breathing. Which brings us to the next tip.

There are lots of reasons why (in most situations) nose breathing beats mouth breathing, but a major one is that the nose cleanses 90 percent of the air before it hits our lungs, filtering out dust, pollen, bacteria, and other nasties. It also releases nitric oxide, a kind of sterilising gas that improves blood circulation and lowers blood pressure.

Mouth breathing is what we need to do in very stressful or exerting situations, so if we breathe through our mouths when we’re scrolling on our phones or sitting at our desks, we send a message to our brains that we need to gasp for air, explains George.

Meanwhile the nose delivers better air quality with less effort. “More bang for your buck,” says George, adding: “It’s as silly to breathe through your mouth as it is to eat through your nose.”

Those of us in desk jobs twist ourselves into all sorts of shapes, but if you place both feet flat on the ground your body automatically feels safer, you relax your abdomen, feel supported in your back and drop your shoulders, says George. And all of that enhances healthy breathing. It also has psychological benefits. “Feeling the ground beneath you puts you in the present moment and that in turn affects your breathing.”

There’s a reason those Victorian damsels were always passing out. Their corsets caused hyperventilation, says George, and our modern fixation with washboard abs isn’t much healthier. In short, if we’re going to walk around with a sucked-in tummy we may as well be laced into a whale-bone contraption.

If you really must bring back a Victorian accessory – make it the fan, says George. The air passing over your mouth and nose sends a calming feedback loop to the brain, she explains. That’s why some of us felt particularly stressed behind our masks, during the worst of the Covid era. And why it’s a good idea to head outside for fresh air after a heated work meeting (but not to smoke of course).

“You know what they say, if exercise were a pill, everyone would take it,” says George.

Moving your body improves lung capacity and regulates breathing and it also calms the mind, which works together with the breath in a kind of constant feedback loop.

George recommends a little game for engaging the senses as well as the muscles next time you take a walk: “Ask yourself to name five things you can see, four things you feel, three things you hear, two things you smell and one thing you taste,” she says. “It will help ground you and make you feel at peace and your breath will naturally calm down.

Actually, you don’t even have to be moving to play that game. “You can do it in the office, you can do it anywhere,” says George adding that she herself is not a “lie-down-and-meditate kind of person... I like things you can do easily in the moment that promote calm normal breathing.”

For those sitting at desks all day, something called “screen apnoea” can develop – meaning we periodically hold our breath as we type. “Check in with yourself during the day,” says George. “Make sure you have soft loose posture and take a nice long breath out.” Yes, that’s the next tip.

We’ve all grown up hearing “take a deep breath” when we’re stressed, but the part of breathing that really calms us, says George, is the breathing out.

So next time you’re in a stressful situation focus on breathing out through the nose. Or if you really want to expel some serious air, do it through the mouth, but through tight lips, as if you were blowing out a candle.

Quite simply, self-soothing isn’t about taking gigantic breaths. “When we do that our brains think we’re stressed and default to ‘gimme more, gimme more’,” says George. “The less you breathe the more your brain feels calm. It thinks ‘I must be in a safe space’.”

If you're exercising intensely or, say, running away from a rabid dog, your breath should naturally speed up and deepen accordingly.

But for the most part, you don’t need to sniff at the air or strive to draw it down into your bowels, says George. With a deep breath you’re aiming for your diaphragm which is the base of your ribs.

Each breath should be about 500ml of air, she says. Which means you don’t need to puff up your chest like a superhero.

“More isn’t better,” George says, pointing out that this maxim doesn’t just apply to the air we breathe, but to the hours we work and the stress we place on ourselves. “You get a pat on the back for being busy in our culture,” she says.

So busy we sometimes forget to breathe.

The information in this article is general in nature and should not be read as personalised medical advice. Readers concerned about their health are advised to see a qualified medical professional.