Nose Breathing Is Key for Good Health and Stress Management

Most people will tell you to take a deep breath to calm yourself down. However, this strategy can actually have the opposite effect.

When you’re stressed, your breath becomes faster, deeper and noisier, you breathe more often through your mouth and you tend to breathe with your upper chest rather than your diaphragm.

As noted by McKeown, it simply doesn’t make sense to amplify your current breathing pattern if you want to bring yourself from a state of stress to a state of calm. To induce calm, you need to breathe slowly, using the diaphragm. You also want to breathe less, and breathing through your nose is key.

Your nose actually directs 30 different functions in your body. Nerves in your nasal passages (which connect to your hypothalamus) sense everything about your breathing and use that information to regulate your bodily functions.

For example, your nose releases nitric oxide (NO) during breathing, which is carried from your nose into your lungs. NO is a gas that plays a significant role in homeostasis (maintaining of balance) within your body.2,3,4,5,6

NO also sterilizes the air carried into your lungs, opens up the airways and increases the amount of oxygen taken up in your blood. You were born to breathe through your nose, yet many develop dysfunctional breathing patterns that lead to mouth breathing.

This in turn can result in other health problems, including asthma. As a result of feeling like you’re not getting enough air, asthmatics tend to breathe heavier, and when you increase the breathing volume coming into your lungs, it causes a loss of carbon dioxide (CO2).
The Importance of Carbon Dioxide Homeostasis

Contrary to popular belief, CO2 is not merely a waste gas. Although you breathe to get rid of excess CO2, it’s important to maintain a certain amount of CO2 in your lungs, and for that you need to maintain a normal breathing volume.

When too much CO2 is lost through heavy breathing, it causes the smooth muscles embedded in your airways to constrict. When this happens, there is a feeling of not getting enough air and the natural reaction is to breathe more intensely.

But this simply causes an even greater loss of CO2, which constricts your airway even further. In this way, asthma symptoms feed back to the condition, and to remedy the situation you need to break this negative feedback loop by breathing through your nose and breathing less.

Also, while most believe that taking bigger breaths through your mouth allows you to take more oxygen into your body, which should make you feel better and more clear-headed, the opposite actually happens.

Deep breathing tends to make you feel a bit light-headed, and this is due to eliminating too much CO2 from your lungs, which causes your blood vessels to constrict. So, the heavier you breathe, the less oxygen is actually delivered throughout your body.

Overbreathing and mouth breathing also tend to go hand-in-hand with snoring and/or sleep apnea; conditions that decimate your sleep quality. This too contributes to the downward health spiral associated with improper breathing.