Air is something we take for granted. It’s all around us and available in unlimited quantities but how many of us consciously think about our breath in terms of our health?
How about if I told you that breathing could be one of your most important tools for detoxification managing stress and achieving calm focused energy. And did you know that by helping our soils breathe we could help to reverse climate change?
Now let’s learn how to breathe, shall we?
It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But most of us spend all day shallow breathing, taking short rapid breaths using only our upper chest; this leads to many negative physiological consequences.
To breathe optimally we need to take three steps.
- Take a slow deep breath in through your nose.
- Breathe down into your belly.
- Breathe out slowly, taking longer than you take to inhale.
We can live for weeks without food, days without water, and just minutes without oxygen – proper airflow matters.
Oxygen is really important to survival and health – it’s our number one source of energy. We spend a great deal of time and money optimising our diet with organic vegetables and 100% grass-fed meats and often overlook that getting oxygen out of our haemoglobin into our tissues and organs is the most fundamental of health factors.
Having optimal oxygen levels promotes the creation of white blood cells and helps the body to absorb nutrients efficiently. With every deep functional breath, your lungs fill with oxygen that is transported in your blood to other detoxing organs including the lymphatic system, kidneys, colon, and the uterus in women.
As we exhale we eliminate part of the body’s waste in the form of carbon dioxide. By breathing deeply we take in more oxygen that cleanses the body, and by exhaling deeply we eliminate more waste. Both actions have an overall detoxifying effect on the body.
We often take breathing for granted and underestimate the importance of drawing awareness to our breath. However, this can result in shallow breathing with side effects that include fatigue and decreased tissue function. Additionally, the brain uses 20% of the oxygen you breathe in, it simply cannot function to its fullest potential if it is not receiving enough oxygen.
In fact, 70% of our detoxification occurs through the breath and only 30% of detoxification occurs from sweating! If the 25,000 or so daily breaths are not optimal then we will simply not be capable of being truly healthy.
So okay it is clear that we want to improve the quality of oxygen we are taking into our bodies, fresh clean air is going to win every time. But in the case of optimal breathing, it isn’t simply a case of taking in as much oxygen as possible. In fact, most of us are over-breathing!
Patrick McKeown, Author of the Oxygen Advantage says it this way; ‘’the presence of carbon dioxide loosens the bond between oxygen and haemoglobin within red blood cells’’ in a nutshell, we need a build-up of CO2 in the blood to facilitate the transfer of oxygen from the blood to the organs and tissues.
Humans are designed to breathe through their noses. Our ancient ancestors only ever relied upon mouth breathing for periods of extreme exertion and then quickly reverted to breathing through their nose again. Why? Because breathing this way maintains the perfect balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide for effective transfer of oxygen and removal of carbon dioxide in our tissues and organs.
We need to get comfortable with breathing less – increasing our tolerance for higher levels of carbon dioxide in our tissues – not more, ideally taking between 3.5 and 5 breaths per minute taken gently through your nose.
In addition to breathing through your nose rather than our mouth, we need to ensure that when inhaling we are expanding our underappreciated diaphragm by pulling the air down towards our belly rather than inflating only the top of our lungs and expanding the rib cage.
The last step of breathing optimally is to ensure you breathe out slowly, taking longer to exhale than inhale. This ‘flips the switch’ on your stress levels shifting you from ‘fight or flight’ instead triggering a relaxation response.
A great way to train yourself to breathe correctly is to take regular ‘breathing’ breaks where you can take several optimal breaths to help train your diaphragm muscles and take the opportunity to be mindful as you calm your physiology through the long calming exhale.
And it’s not just zen masters and yogi’s who have mastered the art of breathing correctly to take control of their minds, navy seals fully understand the importance of breathing to control their parasympathetic nervous system in order to make clear-headed calm decisions under extreme pressure.
See Ex-Navy Seal Mark Divine use the ‘box breathing’ technique to help calm and control a racing mind to clear the way for good decision making.
Researchers have also shown that using the above breathing technique can help us step in between stimulus and response, effectively boosting our willpower.
There are many types of breathwork and ‘how to breathe’ can be as controversial as ‘what to eat.’ The point is to take notice of how you are breathing and do some research.
There are several breathwork approaches. You may want to try out a few different techniques over time to see which type most resonates with you and brings about the best results.
Types of breathwork include:
The importance of breath is important for human health but in regenerative agriculture, we also focus on ensuring our soils can breathe optimally too. Why? Because if our soils can’t breathe, plants cannot properly access nutrients and water so productivity is significantly reduced.
In functional soil, plants achieve nutrients through a symbiosis with the soil food web of microscopic organisms. These tiny bacteria, fungi, and microscopic predators exchange minerals that are normally unavailable with sugary exudates produced by the plant during photosynthesis. If these soil organisms cannot access adequate air and get rid of the waste gasses then they are unable to perform these nutrient exchange services to the plants.
Plants need nitrogen and other nutrients to grow. Nitrogen is one of the most significant limiting factors in production.
The mismanagement of nitrogen, however, is the single largest agriculturally destructive practice. It burns out humus, leaches calcium, acidifies the soil, contaminates ground and surface water and produces nitrous oxide, the most potent greenhouses. Nitrous oxide then returns as nitric acid and destroys forests and symbiotic fungi in the soil through acidifying rainfall!
In compacted soils with poor structure, the airflow is restricted so the microbes responsible for cycling nutrients and fixing nitrogen cannot do their job. 78% of air is made up of nitrogen and there are millions of free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil and root nodules of legumes that can turn this nitrogen in the air into important food for plants. If these pathways are not available then farmers become more and more reliant on artificial forms of nitrogen and other artificial nutrients.
Upwards of 40% of all nitrogen applied to farmland is either lost through groundwater into the rivers and sea or volatilises into the atmosphere – either way it’s an environmental disaster.
Globally we have increased grain production 4 fold by increasing nitrogen input 23 fold. This is not a sustainable way to produce food.
Improving soil health, soil structure and therefore the ability of microbes to breathe in the nitrogen-rich air we could take great steps to reduce or eliminate the use of artificial nitrogen in our food production systems – often with minimal or no loss of yield.
Healthy functional soils can continue to feed plants indefinitely – as long as there is sunshine, rainfall, bedrock and air then this miraculous symbiosis between plant and soil life can offer a truly sustainable way of growing nutrient-dense food.
Ancient cultures referred to and revered the classical elements of water, earth, fire, air, and (later) aether, which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. Ancient cultures in Greece, Tiber, and India had similar lists, sometimes referring in local languages to “air” as “wind” and the fifth element as “void”.
So it seems that throughout history the importance of air as a fundamental force of nature has been recognised.
Optimising our inner airflow and that of the soils and landscapes we rely upon to produce our food could indeed be a big piece of the puzzle for attaining truly sustainable whole system health.
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