10 Fun Facts About Breathing & the Respiratory System
Our ability to breathe is fascinating, as it’s one of the only systems in our body that can be controlled both voluntarily, through the central nervous system, and more often involuntarily, through the autonomic nervous system. This overlap between the two systems is the reason why focused, intentional breathing methods through yoga and meditation are able to affect other involuntary muscles like the heart.
Our breath is what gives us life and without it, the human body cannot exist. But is it possible to better your life by paying more attention to how you breathe?
While breathing is so commonplace to our existence, proper breathing techniques and awareness of breath can have dramatic implications on our health. Having knowledge of specific breathing techniques can lower stress, help you sleep, help your mind function more acutely, and even curb food cravings.
When we breathe, the average adult draws in about 13 pints of air into the lungs every minute. From the lungs, that oxygen is then transferred from the air sacs in our lungs throughout the body via red blood cells to the blood vessels that distribute it to nearly every system. Meanwhile, waste gases, like CO2, are exchanged and filtered out.Â
For the average person with good lung health, the amount of oxygen in the blood, or the arterial blood gas (ABG) oxygen level, should be somewhere between 95-100 percent oxygen.
Interesting Facts About Breathing
1. Breathing is the only autonomous system of the body that we can also control. This means that the body governs it, but we can change how we breathe through conscious breathing practices such as pranayama.
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2. If you laid out the lungs flat, they would cover the size of a tennis court (about 70 square meters!) The right lung is larger than the left: The left lung is made up of two lobes while the right is made up of three.
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3. When we breathe we are either right nostril or left nostril dominant. You can find out which is more active by wetting your thumb and holding it to the right then the left nostril. Yogis believe that when the right is more open or breathing more smoothly we are more driven by the sympathetic nervous system. This means we are more fired up, active, and aroused. Dominance in the left nostril tends to happen when we are relaxed and at ease. The dominance changes around every 20 minutes during the day. Single-nostril breathing can help regulate the left and right sides thereby creating balance in our nervous system.
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4. Breathing more slowly and taking longer breaths can reduce your appetite according to some studies. While mindfulness techniques like visualization and guided imagery have shown to be highly effective for those struggling with food cravings and addiction, slow breathing exercises also proved effective.
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5. It is normal to take around 16 breaths per minute. Asthmatics and people who hyperventilate often double this breathing rate. This leads to taking in more oxygen but expelling too much carbon dioxide, or CO2. When your CO2 is decreased you can’t get as much oxygen setting up a cycle whereby you breathe even faster.
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6. Ancient yogis believed we only have so many breaths in our life. It’s considered within a normal range to take somewhere between 12 to 25 breaths per minute, based on your level of fitness. But the average person takes about 16 breaths per minute, or 960 breaths per hour, 23,040 breaths a day, 8,409,600 a year. If you lived to the age of 75, that would mean 630,720,000 breaths in your lifetime.
But if we could, why not stretch our life span out a bit longer by taking as many slow, deep breaths as possible?
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7. Our breath is an indicator of our mood and our mood is an indicator of our breath. This means that if we change how we breathe we can change our mood. It also means that when our mood changes so does our breath. When it comes to stress, mindful breathing practices are a great tool to lower blood pressure, increase our lung capacity for oxygen, and in the long term, prevent heart disease.
Our brains are always reacting to situations based on our fight-or-flight mechanism, an inherent survival mechanism that surely protected us from fatal situations that occurred often in our more primitive days. In modern society, that mechanism still exists and our brains tend to apply it to the daily stresses of life that aren’t so life-threatening. With that, unfortunately, comes the stress response spiking cortisol and other stress hormones, which when released too often, can lead to chronic fatigue, depression, and disease. But don’t just take our word for it, check out Harvard Medical School’s research backing it.
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8. There are some common breathing habits that we have that we may not even know about. They are the following:Â
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- Only breathing into the chest
- Inhalations are stronger than exhalations
- Breath-holding
- Mouth breathing
- Reverse breathing (where the diaphragm rises instead of falls on the inhale)
- Over-breathing
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9. We breathe in and out of our nose during a yoga practice for a few reasons. The main one is that when we breathe like this we can’t take in so much air or expel so much air. So if we have to resort to opening our mouth to get more air it is an indicator that we have stepped into stressing or pushing our bodies.
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10. Mouth-breathing can contribute to the following:
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- Misaligned bite
- Bad breath
- Snoring
- Sleep apneaÂ
- Night-time urination
With the increasing research we have, showing the importance of breath and breathing habits, it’s becoming more and more clear that being mindful of your breath is incredibly beneficial to your overall health and wellbeing. So if you haven’t already, try practicing some mindful breathing techniques and watch how quickly the various systems of your body begin to respond.
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5 Challenges in Meditation
We hear a lot about the benefits of a regular meditation practice, but life – and our own minds can get in the way. When we do make time for our meditation practice, we can be easily distracted by some of its more common pitfalls. Here are five common challenges we face in meditation:
1. Impatience
Feeling the urge to be doing something else during a meditation session is probably the biggest meditation obstacle out there. Impatience causes us to end meditation sessions early, impedes our concentration and frequently makes us stop our practice altogether.
The key to counteracting impatience is to recognize the very existence of the feeling itself. If we feel the insatiable urge to do something else, it is important to acknowledge the feeling of impatience instead of giving into it. By acknowledging our impatience, we empower ourselves to effectively deal with it versus allowing it to rule us.
After acknowledging the feeling, we must remind ourselves that the benefits from a daily meditation practice will help us be more effective in everything we do afterward, including those activities that are causing our impatience. A calm, effective mind helps with decision making, anxiety and clear thinking.
Secondly, by identifying and isolating the feeling of impatience, we can then practice letting go of it, which gets to the essence of meditation—recognizing unproductive thoughts and letting go of them.
2. Lack of Time
So often we set intentions to meditate regularly, but our practice ends up getting tossed aside for “more important” things. We often feel like there are a million other things we need to do before we have time for our meditation practice.
The key here is prioritizing meditation by working on our perception of it. If we view meditation as a core part of our routine, like brushing our teeth or taking a shower, then missing meditation is no longer an option. We go through a routine to prepare our physical bodies for the day, so why not have one for our minds, as well?
3. Lack of Sleep
It is very, very difficult to meditate without enough sleep. If we begin meditating on little sleep, we often feel drowsy and end up dozing off. Not very productive! Also, a sleep deficit reduces our ability to concentrate and control our thoughts, which makes our meditation sessions far less effective. We are also less likely to meditate in the first place when fatigue undermines our resolve.
What’s the answer? Take a break and get some sleep! It’s okay to let go and allow ourselves the restoration we need to be successful.
4. Feeling “good enough”
Feeling good can be our biggest inspiration and our biggest obstacle. If we are not careful, feeling good can subtlety erode our resolve to continue with our meditation practice. The idea that because we feel good, we don’t need to meditate seems like it makes sense on the surface, but will ultimately undo our progress if we follow it. It can be as simple as waking up in the morning and deciding to lounge around and enjoy the morning instead of meditating because “we feel good, so it’s all good.” If we skip too many times we will regress in our practice and lose the positive mindset we cultivated.
Good is good, but great is even better. We can only reach great if we keep up our meditation. Focus on maintaining and improving the positive experience.
5. Stopping short
This is a very subtle pitfall in our meditation practice which can take a very long time to overcome if we do not realize it is happening. This occurs during a session when our mind finally settles into a place of calm and then we decide to immediately terminate the meditation because we think that we have achieved our goal. By terminating our session early, we are in fact missing out on the enormous benefits from continuing.
We can think of meditation in two steps. Step one is achieving the initial calm during a meditation and step two is sitting with that calm. By residing in a tranquil state we deepen our calm, improve our clarity and strengthen our feeling of relaxation for the post-meditation period.
How to Avoid These Meditation Pitfalls
Let Gaia guide you toward a stronger meditation practice. In the Here & Now Meditation Guide, you will create a solid foundation of new habits backed up by neuroscience.
