Part II: What’s so special about breathing through your nose?

Well, there are so many reasons it’s hard to begin listing them all. As was already mentioned, breathing through your nose shifts you into the rest and restorative side of your nervous system. This reduces your heart rate, blood pressure and excess muscle tension you’re not in need of. It stops the flow of those stressful chemicals that are generated when you need to flee or fight off a threat as well as helping to metabolize them should they be present in your blood stream. Breathing is an autonomic/automatic process that we don’t have to think about. Just like our heart beating and other processes that we don’t have to think about occur. Like digestion, regulation of hormones, sweating etc.  

Breathing is also a process that can be used to control these other autonomic systems within our body. That’s why it is possible to consciously change the side of our nervous system we are functioning in primarily. When we were cave people that was as simple as realizing we were no longer under threat or had acquired the food we needed to survive. Then we shifted back into the breathing pattern that shifts our nervous system back to rest and restoration. If it hadn’t, the stress of staying in the other side would have been detrimental to our survival. 

In our modern world we have other methods that can mitigate or at least bypass the harmful effects of staying in the fight or flight side of our nervous system. Our medical system is based on relieving these symptoms of prolonged exposure to this state. It provides a temporary respite from those symptoms without addressing the root cause. It becomes a downward cycle from there leading to tissue and organ damage, along with compromising our physical, mental and emotional health. 

It’s amazing that just shifting to breathing through your nose can have such a profound effect on keeping you healthy.