Learning to breathe

For something so basic to health, good breathing doesn't come naturally to most of us. NIKI BEZZANT finds out where we're going wrong.

-  NIKI BEZZANT

If social media and the wellness press are to be believed, most of us are walking around performing one of our most fundamental bodily functions incorrectly. "You're probably breathing wrong", go the headlines and YouTube descriptions.

It's enticing clickbait. How could I be breathing wrong? Isn't it involuntary? Is this another thing I need to worry about perfecting? And yet it's believable enough: on any given day, you could find a fair chunk of the people around you complaining of fatigue, brain fog, poor digestion or aching muscles - all things that are attributed to breathing incorrectly. It's a thing that sounds, in the words of comedian Stephen Colbert, truthy enough.

Physiotherapist Tania Clifton-Smith is an Auckland based breathing educator and the author of How to Take a Breath. She says it's probably an exaggeration to say most of us are breathing incorrectly. But the science does show that an awareness of our breathing can have a "profound effect" on many aspects of our health. "It's not just about the efficiency of lung function, but your nervous system, digestive system, your lymphatic system, voice production - breathing goes beyond just getting air into the lungs."

Breathing has an impact on every system in the body. A growing body of evidence shows optimal breathing benefits everything from blood pressure to diabetes to anxiety. Clifton-Smith says breathing exercises can even be useful for hormonal challenges such as menopause.

Another physiotherapist, Scott Peirce, who's been researching breathing at AUT, reckons more than a few of us are not breathing as well as we could be. "I think there are probably shades of dysfunction," he says.