“Of the essentials of preserving life, nourishing the breath has no peer. When the breath is exhausted the body dies.”
- Zen Master Hakuin
Einstein once said that theoretical physicists are “tamed metaphysicians.” This article presents a theory, both physical and metaphysical, that this untamed metaphysician has spent more than twenty years developing. As such, this article is quite a bit longer than my usual offerings.
In an effort to improve readability, I’ve split this piece into three separate articles: Breath, Mind, Body.
The Breath and Disease - A Materialist Perspective
Elsewhere I have written about the flawed prevailing view of the scientific medical establishment that genetics are to blame for just about every health condition under the sun. I’m going to give two examples where the folly of this approach is very easily demonstrated.
Bunions are not caused by bad genes, but by what is essentially the foot binding effect of ill-fitting shoes:
Likewise, crooked teeth are not caused by genetics, but by mouthbreathing. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had broader faces, straight teeth, enough room for their wisdom teeth, and rarely had cavities - all of this without the help of dentists. The transition to a softer agricultural diet, led to crooked teeth, mouthbreathing, and an increase in cavities; this process accelerated greatly during the industrial revolution when diets became very soft. Richard Klein, a paleontologist and expert in the human fossil record has stated, "I've never seen a hunter-gatherer skull with crooked teeth."
The vast majority of chronic diseases can be shown to originate in physical, environmental causes such as these, resulting from our deviating from the environment and lifestyle we evolved under.
Mouth-breathing is of particular importance due to its devastating downstream health consequences; a staggering array of common chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, depression, and cancer are linked to mouth-breathing. Why is this? Because mouth-breathing leads to a habitual overbreathing pattern by reprogramming the brain to be intolerant of carbon dioxide. Overbreathing depletes the body of oxygen at the cellular level, by depleting the body of carbon dioxide, which plays a vital role in the transfer of oxygen from hemoglobin into the cells of the body, as described by the Bohr effect.
"All chronic pain, suffering and diseases are caused by a lack of oxygen at the cell level."
Dr. Arthur C. Guyton,, M.D., author "The Textbook on Medical Physiology" - World’s Bestselling Medical Physiology Textbook
In all likelihood, your physician has read this quote, because it comes from the most commonly used physiology textbook in the world. Has your physician ever talked to you about how to boost oxygen at the cellular level to prevent or treat chronic disease? Probably not, because of the delusive blame-the-genes paradigm, which leads to a focus on using pharmaceuticals to treat symptoms instead of addressing root causes.
James Nestor succinctly describes how overbreathing leads to chronic disease in his New York Times Bestseller, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art:
“When we breathe too much, we expel too much carbon dioxide, and our blood pH rises to become more alkaline; when we breathe slower and hold in more carbon dioxide, pH lowers and blood becomes more acidic. Almost all cellular functions in the body take place at a blood pH of 7.4, our sweet spot between alkaline and acid. When we stray from that, the body will do whatever it can to get us back there. The kidneys, for instance, will respond to overbreathing by “buffering,”* a process in which an alkaline compound called bicarbonate is released into the urine. With less bicarbonate in the blood, the pH lowers back to normal, even if we continue to huff and puff. It’s as if nothing ever happened. The problem with buffering is that it’s meant as a temporary fix, not a permanent solution. Weeks, months, or years of overbreathing, and this constant kidney (renal) buffering will deplete the body of essential minerals. This occurs because as bicarbonate leaves the body, it takes magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and more with it. Without healthy stores of these minerals, nothing works right: nerves malfunction, smooth muscles spasm, and cells can’t efficiently create energy. Breathing becomes even more difficult. This is one reason why asthmatics and other people with chronic respiratory problems are prescribed supplements like magnesium to stave off further attacks. Constant buffering also weakens the bones, which try to compensate by dissolving their mineral stores back into the bloodstream. (Yes, it’s possible to overbreathe yourself into osteoporosis and increased risk of bone fractures.) This unending grind of imbalances and compensations, of deficiencies and strain, will eventually break the body down...
*a process in which an alkaline compound called bicarbonate is released into the urine. With less bicarbonate in the blood, the pH lowers back to normal, even if we continue to huff and puff. It’s as if nothing ever happened. Cells “buffer” too. Whenever there is a decrease in circulation or oxygen, cells will produce energy (ATP) anaerobically. This process creates a more acidic “microenvironment” in which oxygen can more easily disassociate from hemoglobin...The real damage from overbreathing comes from the constant energy the body has to expend to run more cells anaerobically and to constantly buffer for carbon dioxide deficiencies.”
Hyperventilation deprives the body of oxygen at the cellular level, shifting cellular metabolism into anaerobic mode, depleting the body of precious minerals and creating a cascading effect across all of the body’s organs and systems, which breaks down the body over time.
Dr. Konstantin Buteyko was a Ukranian engineer turned physiologist who developed a method for treating chronic disease by retraining the brain to breathe less, increase carbon dioxide, and thus increase oxygen delivery to the cells of the body.
Dr. Buteyko once gave a speech where he said:
“Before telling you about the basic concept of the method, I would like to emphasize that I describe medicine generally in two directions. One direction is the so-called official Western. The other, Eastern medicine. It has transpired that the truth is on the side of the Eastern medicine which has always stated that diseases occur as a result of diseased breathing.”
The East, particularly, India, China and Tibet, have an extraordinarily deep understanding of the relationship between breath, mind, body, and disease.
Pranayama, the Indian breath control system focused on increasing carbon dioxide tolerance through breath holding, is described in the ancient yogic texts as having miraculous healing power. Today we can explain this miraculous healing power in Western scientific terms as resulting from increased oxygen delivery to the cells of the body.
It is worth noting that the modern version of pranayama, which evolved from the influence of Western ideas in the late nineteenth century, is nothing like the original pranayama. The original pranayama was focused on increasing carbon dioxide tolerance, and thus decreasing respiration volume, through breath-holding. Across many different animal species, the animals that breath the least live the longest and the animals that breathe the most die the quickest.
“A Yogi's life is measured not by the number of years he lives but by the number of his breaths"
-B.K.S. Iyengar
The Chinese systems of Qigong and Tai Chi take a different approach to reach the same destination. Instead of holding the breath to increase carbon dioxide tolerance, the focus is on breathing slightly less than normal. In Tai Chi competitions, points are deducted if the practitioner can be seen breathing.
Tai Chi master Chris Pei, explains how breathing is viewed in Tai Chi:
“Generally speaking, there are three levels of breathing. The first level is to breathe softly, so that a person standing next to you does not hear you breathing. The second level is to breathe softly so that you do not hear yourself breathing. And the third level is to breathe softly so that you do not feel yourself breathing.”
In Taoist and Zen meditation manuals, there is a technique of progressively making the breath more subtle known as “tuning the breath,” which is linked not just with healing but with being able to quiet and stop thought.
“The more subtle our breath is, the more peaceful our mind and body will be.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh
Most of us in the West are hyperventilating, breathing more than is necessary to meet metabolic needs. Hyperventilation restricts blood flow to the brain, and it reduces the amount of oxygen transferred from the blood into the brain’s cells.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) plays an important role in relaxing the smooth muscles surrounding our airways, arteries, and capillaries. Normally, the partial pressure of CO2 in our bloodstream is around 40mmHg. However, if we breathe too heavily and lower the arterial CO2 levels, blood flow to the brain decreases, resulting in reduced oxygenation and detrimental cognitive effects. With a normal breathing volume of 5 liters of air per minute, the partial pressure of carbon dioxide is 40mmHg. Each 1 mmHg drop of arterial CO2 reduces blood flow to the brain by 2%.
Low levels of CO2 in the blood can cause constriction of the carotid artery, the main blood vessel supplying the brain, and this effect may be particularly pronounced in those with anxiety and panic attacks. Studies have also shown that increases in CO2 can reduce cortical excitability, and breathing too much and lowering CO2 concentrations can cause the brain to become abnormally excited, leading to uncontrolled thoughts.
“Hyperventilation leads to spontaneous and asynchronous firing of cortical neurons” - Huttunen et. Al (1999)
Balestrino and Somjen (1988) and Huttunen et al. (1999) demonstrated that CO2 reduces cortical excitability, which is supported in Normal Breathing: The Key to Vital Health, which states that "breathing too much makes the human brain abnormally excited due to reduced CO2 concentrations. As a result, the brain gets literally out of control due to appearance of spontaneous and asynchronous (‘self-generated’) thoughts." Balestrino and Somjen (1988) directly claimed that "The brain, by regulating breathing, controls its own excitability." These findings suggest the importance of maintaining proper CO2 levels in the body for optimal brain function. The constriction of the carotid artery is estimated to be as much as 50% for those with anxiety and panic attacks, as stated by Gibbs (1992) and Ball & Shekhar (1997).
“Spontaneous and asynchronous firing of cortical neurons” is the technical way of saying that the cells of your brain firing randomly and uncontrollably, creating “self-generated" thoughts, thoughts that you didn’t intend to think and have no control over.
One of the most devastating consequences of the hyperventilation epidemic is a total lack of control over the thought process. Can you stop thinking for a minute? How about thirty seconds? Unless you’re a very experienced meditator, the answer is probably not.
The incidence of so-called “mental” illness, which is in fact brain disease, has been rapidly accelerating very recent decades, with an absolute explosion during the pandemic. The Psychology and Psychiatry establishments have very little understanding of the role that the breath plays in the generation of uncontrolled thoughts, despite the fact that neuroscientists are on the right track.
Depression, Anxiety, ADHD, OCD, Bipolar Disorder, and Schizoprhenia, could all be characterized as uncontrolled thinking. Indeed, by Eastern standard’s the vast majority of so-called sane people are beset by pathological uncontrolled thinking.
In the next section about Mind, we will explore the following concept:
“The breath is the mirror to the mind.”
-Paul Harvey, Center for Yoga Studies
If you’d like to sample the power of reduced breathing to quiet and calm the mind, please try this five-minute reduced breathing meditation:
Really great article, Michael. Thank you for the nice video at the end, too! Very relaxing.