How Breathwork and Meditation Benefit Overall Wellbeing

Our bodies have innate healing wisdom with systems that can actually heal themselves. Our automatic nervous system controls heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, and sexual arousal, but these functions can exist in two different states. There’s the sympathetic response for survival—this is your fight or flight response—and the parasympathetic response where your body can rest and digest.

The problem in our modern society is that our minds can’t tell the difference between non-life threatening states of fear and overwhelm from actual life threatening nes. Whether a lion is chasing you down or you’re stressed over a work deadline, your body will go into the sympathetic response. Any time we’re overloaded, burned out, or triggered, our bodies are in a survival state. While your logical brain can understand that you’re not in physical danger, this ancient survival instinct within your nervous system is already in motion.

What Happens in the Survival State

A lot of really important body functions are reduced or turned off completely in order to go into survival mode and fight or flee from a threat. Our nervous system automatically goes into fight or flight which inhibits:

1. Your ability to rest and digest

2. Your body’s growth and repair

3. And your rational thinking

When your nervous system is in the sympathetic response, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that controls logic, thinking, and decision making) goes offline and brain is mostly controlled by the amygdala (part of the brain that controls emotions—particularly fear).

The upside for our ancestors being chased by lions was that the threat came and went and the stress cycle was able to complete. Their bodies entered the sympathetic response to engage fight or flight, and then eased into the parasympathetic response for recovery. Unfortunately, in our modern society it’s common for people to live go-go-go lives moving from waking up to social media to sitting in traffic to meeting deadlines at work and leading full social lives. There’s often little room or time for the body to move out of the sympathetic response and into parasympathetic response. 

Even though we’re almost never in actual danger, our bodies believe we are because they cannot distinguish between a high stress modern lifestyle and actual life threatening stress. The result is most of us are living much of our lives in survival mode, stuck in a cycle of stress response with little to no stress release. Stuck in a state of survival—stuck in the sympathetic response—so our bodies cannot heal, grow, or repair. Most of us are stuck there, and we’re reaping the results in physical symptoms and chronic illnesses. 

When we are in the stress response cycle, our bodies send chemical signals like adrenaline and cortisol through our bodies. It’s not good for our systems to be bathed in stress hormones all the time—it eventually downgrades our immune system and we get sick more often.

I’ve been that person. For a long time, I had a variety of health problems: chronic body pain, back spasms, brain fog, fatigue, depression, anxiety. And after years of seeking answers, I finally found out these were all symptoms of PTSD. In fact, research has found that adults who rate high in Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE)—more on this in a future blog—are more likely to have chronic illness and overall worse health than adults that only experienced a handful of Adverse Childhood Experiences. The take away from this correlation is that stress is a building block of disease (both mental and physical). The more stress we have, the worse our health will be. And it’s not just ambiguous “stress,” but physically living in the parasympathetic survival state that stress triggers in our bodies.

Stimulating Rest and Digest

When we stimulate a parasympathetic response, the prefrontal cortex comes back online and our body has the ability to heal, grow, and restore. In this state, we rest better, digest better, and think more clearly.

This is where breathwork and meditation come in. When we regularly practice using physical breathing techniques designed for mental healing, we’re giving our bodies time in the parasympathetic state which allows it to heal. 

A 5-10 minute meditation practice can have profound effects on your mental and physical health. In fact, there are so many studies now that show evidence that consistently practicing breathwork and meditation positively improves mental and physical wellbeing. Research is finding that a combination of breathwork and meditation helps people manage depression, anxiety, chronic pain, high blood pressure, ADHD, insomnia, PTSD, inflammation, and autoimmune disorders. Breathwork is also shown to radically reduce or reverse the symptoms of sleep apnea, asthma, and other breathing disorders.

Using Breath to Activate Rest and Digest

Breath is our way to influence the autonomic nervous system. Although this system is involuntary, it is affected by our breath. Breath can act as an accelerator (moving into fight or flight) or a brake (moving into rest and digest) simply depending on how you are breathing. Short, quick chest breathing signals to your body’s distress, and it responds by stimulating the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight). Long, slow, deep belly breathing signals to your body relaxation and it responds by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). 

Using Meditation to Activate Rest and Digest

Meditation also brings the body into a rested state. However, many of us know that simply because you are sitting in stillness doesn’t mean that our mind stops chattering. In this case, meditation can end up being more activating than soothing because the mind chatter keeps the person from entering a relaxed state. I share more about this “monkey mind” in my last blog about deepening meditation practice, because if we’ve been stuck in the stress response for a long time, it can take time and practice for your mind to learn how to surrender into deeper, relaxed meditation states. This is the hurdle that many beginner meditators face.

To help those who desire better rest and relaxation and want to take action through meditation to improve health, I created Meditate on a Habit—a group meditation program designed to help you reach deeper states of meditation through focal and breathwork techniques that are simple and easy to use and apply to your lifestyle.

Meditate on a Habit is a 9-week private group program that starts on October 11th, so sign up now to save your spot! Creating a consistent practice of giving yourself a nervous system reboot can drastically change so much about your life, your health and your way of being.