Research: “The Rhythm of Breathing Affects Memory and Fear”.
Rhythm of Breathing Affects Memory and Fear
A new study (linked) reports the rhythm of your breathing can influence neural activity that enhances memory recall and emotional judgement.
http://neurosciencenews.com/memory-fear-breathing-5699/
And the research on the positive benefits of functional breathing for our health keeps piling up. Yet, whilst most of us are unaware, pretty much all of us do no breathe functionally. We over breathe – both in rate and volume.
I’d like to focus on what was suggested about the findings from the study in the linked article.
“The findings imply that rapid breathing may confer an advantage when someone is in a dangerous situation, Zelano said.
If you are in a panic state, your breathing rhythm becomes faster,” Zelano said. “As a result you’ll spend proportionally more time inhaling than when in a calm state. Thus, our body’s innate response to fear with faster breathing could have a positive impact on brain function and result in faster response times to dangerous stimuli in the environment.”
This is a great advantage when you are in a dangerous or emergency situation, yet, in the modern world, most of us are not.
However most of us breathe far too rapidly and with far too much volume (we over breathe), which the study points out is our body’s instinctive, and advantageous, response to an emergency or dangerous state. This implies that the way we now breathe, as a result of a mismatch between the body we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and the culture we live in, has us perpetually in this innate, or instinctive, emergency mode neurologically (or as far as our brain is concerned), which is a considerable disadvantage as we are not in emergency situations often at all.
The metabolic impact on our health of being permanently in emergency mode (fight or flight) or sympathetic nervous system dominance is huge. My blog linked goes into detail about this..
Email me at tim@timaltman.com.au or call 0425 739 918 if you want to learn how to get out of emergency mode.