It is scientifically proven 90% of us can’t breathe properly. Fortunately, working on your breath can be learned and is vital to health, energy, immunity and cognitive function. Timely investigation.
It started as a little music. An email from this leading lady to offer a breathwork evening hosted at her home with a yoga teacher. The reaction of the guests, their enthusiastic haste to answer raised the tempo a notch. “Finally a moment to breathe,” added others. A few days later, another high-ranking interviewee at lunch recommends this book, which has changed his life and energy level, especially at work; Breathe, the bestseller by American journalist James Nestor, published in the US last year, is coming to France. This impressive survey conducted by the author Deep (his first book, in which he has already scientifically explored the world of freedivers), with the great support of neuroscientific research and meetings with high-level researchers (especially from Harvard), reveals the undoubted power of breathing on our health. , our immunity, our sleep, as well as the functioning of our cognitive functions. “I changed everything in my habits,” continues his impressed reader. And I suggested it to all my employees.
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Everywhere from yoga centers to medical spaces, cardio classes open to packed houses. The free app RespiRelax+, created by Les Thermes d’Allevard, a thermal spa in the Alps specializing in the treatment of respiratory diseases recognized by the entire medical profession, has become one of the most downloaded in France (2 million downloads ). His followers come not only to relieve their stressful lives but, and this is news, to improve their immunity, “reduce overall levels of inflammation in the body” and “restore their full cognitive function potential.” What role does breathing play in all of this? This is the question that guided this investigation.
Freediving day and night
China Lantzman is a female leadership coach in Paris. 2021 He crossed it in a long blur. “I was getting more and more tired,” recalls the founder of Woman Impact. And I always found a good reason to explain this tiredness: the Covid vaccine, my in-laws coming home for Christmas… But, after two or three hours of work every day, I was flat. I could no longer work, think, and even seriously came to tell myself that I had become a fool. He organizes his schedule. Sleeps for an hour every day…, gets tangled up.
25% of adults over the age of 30 officially suffer from sleep apnea, 80% of cases will go undiagnosed.
A doctor’s visit changes everything. he suspects late-onset sleep apnea and recommends checking with a cardiologist. “You’re paired overnight, a finger oximeter, with a device that measures your breathing,” Chyna explains. The diagnosis is simple: severe sleep apnea. “The machine found that I was choking thirty-five times an hour. In a survival instinct, the brain then sends a micro-emission into your body that causes a micro-awakening. And so it is until the morning, which leaves you exhausted.” After this diagnosis, Chayne Lanzman sleeps with a device that prevents her airway from being blocked. “I’m alive again,” she exclaims. I can work all day without any problems, with much more energy than before. I couldn’t live without it.”
Today, scientists estimate that while 25% of adults over 30 officially suffer from sleep apnea, 80% of cases go undiagnosed. Hence the national public health campaign launched by the government on this topic this year. So much for night breathing. But this, James Nestor teaches us, is entirely determined by our breathing during the day. In this case, with the ability to breathe well through the nose, stress not only interferes with breathing, but also pushes us to inhale air through the mouth. Also, our ability to regulate the rhythm of our breathing comes into play; we will see why later. a discipline that has become a daily way of life for many Americans… and increasingly for French women.
Seek peace
Isabelle Dueburn, founder of TheInvisibleCollection, discovered her reading Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir, written after her 2017 presidential loss. Do the famous cardio exercise called 3-6-5. three times a day, practice six breaths. per minute for five minutes, he emphasizes. I said to myself. if a woman is busy enough to do it, so can I. Today, I practice these breaths before a board meeting or a difficult meeting. The exercise has also significantly eased the burden of Zoom meetings, in my case six or seven a day until late at night, as our offices are located between London, Paris and New York.
How would he specifically describe the benefits? “It helped me start these meetings in a super calm and very positive way, she continues, to avoid the feeling of suffocation they can provide, them and all the screens that block us. My whole lifestyle has benefited from it. I have clearer ideas and I feel so much less tired. It also helped me rebalance my hormones, which is never insignificant during perimenopause…”
Optimal brain function
Therefore, breathing better will help balance the body, think better. That’s what the studies say. If the role of breathing on immunity and health was already scientifically proven, then the evidence of its effect on brain function is very recent. The Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CRNL) has thus discovered that breathing rhythm acts as a kind of brain metronome, a synchronization tool that facilitates communication between different parts of the brain, especially during quiet wakefulness. In other words, relaxed breathing, achieved by e.g. lengthening the gap between inhalation and exhalation, provides conditions for optimal cognitive performance.
Provided that here we breathe well through the nose. indeed, it is probably thanks to the olfactory receptors in the nasal cavity (sensitive to pressure fluctuations) that the rhythm of breathing is transmitted to the brain. Another scientific study (Pearl et al., 2019) showed that brain synchronization disappeared when participants breathed through their mouths.
Maybe you should breathe out what you’re holding in first, take a break
Valerie Acari, Les metamorFoses association
And it’s not over. “The new era of intuitive neurotechnology is opening up our field of knowledge even more,” adds Delfina Remy-Butang, founder of Digital Women’s Day and The Bureau (a digital strategy consultancy). I discovered an amazing company, ONTBO (OK to not be OK), was created by 26-year-old young entrepreneur Athenais Oslati. Its technology, thanks to artificial intelligence, analyzes the emotions of its user and sends them “music” that will come to accompany, enhance or balance their current state and thus bring them to a better heart harmony. When human intelligence is combined with artificial intelligence, we can improve cognitive performance, fight depression and stress in a more personalized way.
Breathing is individual
That last word is important. Blandin Stinzi, a former polytechnic turned screenwriter, is also a practitioner of the Feldenkra Method. In its center VI ce stateside in Paris, he organizes breathing workshops* for executives who are overworked or overwhelmed, as he was, by back pain. “Breath is very personal,” he says. The speed and amount of air each person needs varies depending on their location, location or altitude. Our brain can naturally regulate the first movement of breath so that it goes in the right amount to the muscles or parts of our body that need it, but we have forgotten or unlearned. Many people stop breathing when they try to control their breath. Or, conversely, they end up in oxygen overload.
The Feldenkrais method asks a person about their activities to help them find the natural way of breathing in the body. What happens in terms of breathing if one loosens the pelvis a bit instead of standing up straight? Or when you bring your chin forward under the roof of your mouth to release the air inside your jaw. Well, often we yawn. Without stopping, as if releasing a stream that had been suppressed for a very long time. “By exploring an area, the unknown movement helps connect the analytical brain to the intuitive, emotional brain,” Blandy explains to Stinzi. It releases enthusiasm, different relationships with the unknown, and ultimately creativity. I tested it with many students of Central and Polytechnic, believe me, it works.”
find inspiration
During the three breath-taking evenings he organized at home, Valérie Acari, former president of the BBDO France communications agency and today head of the Les MétamorFoses association, hallucinated to see the effect on his guests. He suggested exercises. “When we breathe, we speak better and better, and it seems to free us to listen as well,” he says. During these three evenings, everyone rarely talked about his life, the changes taking place in him, his desires to do something else, somewhere else. Maybe you should first exhale what is holding you back, take a break, find a second wind, get inspired by things again.
Disturbing news, a depressed world of work… “Today, everyone is holding their breath as if to protect themselves from danger,” Valerii Accari analyzes. But in doing so, we lose freedom along with desire. I would even say: the vision. However, a leader’s strength is his inspired vision, his ability to coach the teams behind him. To breathe is to move again. “I will add that working on your breathing gives you perspective and helps fight against the constant feeling of urgency, this rush to finish, to finish,” slips Delfina Remy-Butang. When we watch his breathing, we see that nothing actually stops. We are in motion, constant construction. It’s important to find this sense of progress over a long period of time. In a fast-paced world, it might even help keep your sanity.
In the video: Breathing exercises to relax before an important meeting
Source: Le Figaro
