Breathwork

You’ve been breathing since the second you were born and nobody has ever shown you how.

That’s fine, most of the time. Your body does it without you.

But there are moments when the body gets it wrong. The plane starts rolling. The phone rings with bad news. You drop something you can’t replace. Your chest goes tight, your breath goes short and shallow, and your head follows it.

The trick is that it works the other way round too. Slow the breath down on purpose and the head has no choice but to come with it.

Here are the techniques I’ve actually used, what each one is for, and the one I’d keep if I could only keep one.

This is the one for when you need to chill the f*ck out.

It gets called Navy SEAL breathing because Mark Divine, who used to be one, has spent twenty years teaching it to anyone who’ll listen. It’s a square. Four sides, four seconds each.

1. Breathe in through your nose for four seconds.

2. Hold for four.

3. Breathe out for four.

4. Hold for four. Go again.

Keep it going for five minutes if you can, ten if you’ve got them. The first lap feels like nothing. By the fourth your shoulders have come down from your ears.

I use this all the time. Before take-off. After bad news. When I drop and break something and the first thing out of my mouth is “f*ck this”. A couple of laps and I can deal with whatever it is.

That’s the whole technique. If you read nothing else here, that’s the one.

This one is for sleep.

Dr Andrew Weil, the Harvard-trained doctor out in Arizona, popularised it. It’s a yoga breath with the numbers made simple enough to remember when you’re half gone.

1. In through the nose, quietly, for four.

2. Hold for seven.

3. Out through the mouth, with a bit of a whoosh, for eight.

Four rounds is enough. Weil says don’t do more than that when you’re starting out, and he’s right: the long hold makes you light-headed.

The point is the exhale. Eight seconds out is twice what went in, and a long slow breath out is the body’s own signal that nothing is chasing it.

I wrote more about getting to sleep in How to fall asleep faster. This is the breathing half of it.

Slow and steady. No holds, no counting past six.

1. In for five or six seconds.

2. Out for five or six seconds.

3. Keep it going for at least five minutes.

That’s roughly five breaths a minute, against the twelve to twenty you’d do without thinking. Stephen Elliott gave it the name in his 2005 book The New Science of Breath, and it’s the pace that heart rate variability researchers keep landing on.

It’s the least dramatic technique on this list, which is why it’s the one you can do at your desk with nobody noticing.

Nadi Shodhana, if you want the yoga name. Sounds complicated. It isn’t: breathe in one side, breathe out the other.

1. Sit down, close your eyes.

2. Thumb over the right nostril, breathe in through the left.

3. Ring finger over the left nostril, breathe out through the right.

4. In through the right. Swap. Out through the left.

5. Keep going for five to ten minutes.

I’ve read a lot of claims about this one balancing the two halves of your brain. I can’t vouch for any of them. What I can tell you is that it forces you to pay attention to one small thing for ten minutes, and that alone clears the fog on the days you feel unbalanced as f*ck.

If paying attention to one small thing sounds like something you’re bad at, I covered it in How to be mindful.

This is the opposite of everything above. Fast, loud, rhythmic, from Kundalini yoga. Think of it as breathwork’s version of a HIIT workout.

1. Sit with your back straight.

2. Breathe in deep, then push the breath out hard and fast through your nose, pulling your belly in on each one.

3. Let the breath in take care of itself. Keep it going for one to three minutes.

Thirty seconds in, you’re warm. A minute in, you’re awake. It gives you an energy kick faster than a triple espresso and it doesn’t cost anything.

This is the deep sh*t.

Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina came up with it in the seventies, after LSD was made illegal and he needed another way to get people to the same place. The name means “moving towards wholeness”. The method is simpler than the name: lie down, close your eyes, breathe fast and deep with no pause between breaths, and keep going for anything from half an hour to an hour.

Let the body do what it wants. People shake, cry, laugh, see things. The idea is that whatever is buried comes up and you let it.

It is an altered state, without the drugs, and it is not something to try on your own from a blog post. Grof’s people do it in a room with a trained facilitator and a partner sitting with you, and that’s how I’d do it.

If you’re into extreme sh*t, Wim Hof is your guy. The Iceman. He uses this to sit in freezing water and climb mountains in shorts, and the breathing is the half of his method you can do in your kitchen.

1. Sit or lie down somewhere comfortable.

2. Breathe in deep through the nose, filling the lungs right up.

3. Let it go out through the mouth. Don’t force it.

4. Thirty of those, quick. Deep in, let go.

5. After the last one, breathe out and hold, empty, for as long as you can without straining.

6. Then one deep breath in, hold it for fifteen seconds, and let go.

Your fingers tingle. Your head goes light. The first time you manage a two-minute hold on empty lungs you feel like you could lift a car. Then you do another round.

I rate it. It builds a tolerance for the feeling of panic, which is useful far beyond cold water.

Seven techniques is six more than you need.

Four-seven-eight at night. Breath of fire if you need waking up. The rest are worth a go when you’ve got the time and the curiosity.

But the one I’d keep is the box.

It needs nothing, it takes a minute, nobody can see you doing it, and it works on a plane, in a car park and in the middle of an argument. Four in, four hold, four out, four hold.

Go round the square until you can think again. That’s all.