Nitric oxide which relaxes narrowed blood vessels, increasing oxygen and blood flow.
Science Explains Why Deep Breathing Calms You Down
We take it for granted that breathing
and feelings go hand in hand: Deep breaths make us calm, and short,
shallow ones signal a sense of panic. This undeniable link is what’s
responsible for the success of almost every wellness intervention out
there — from yoga to meditation to laughter and running — but why
it’s such a powerful connection was never clear until now. By probing
the neurological breathing center, scientists discovered the part of the
brain that controls the intensity of breathing in the first place.
On Thursday, a team of scientists report that they’ve pinpointed a tiny ball of neurons in the brain’s “breathing center” that reaches out to the area that deals with general alertness, attention, and stress. The paper’s lead author, Kevin Yackle, Ph.D., a physiologist at University of California-San Francisco, tells Inverse
that this was an unexpected discovery, despite the obvious link between
breathing and yoga, meditation, and other wellness practices.
“It’s
known that breathing is connected with all these things, but how —
whether it was direct or indirect — wasn’t known,” he said in a phone
call from Austria, where he was presenting his work at a neuroscience
conference. “And so, this was surprising to us — to be able to find that
there’s a specific neuron in the breathing center that’s doing this.”
Yackle
was well aware of the brain’s breathing center — a knot of neurons
known as the pre-Bötzinger complex (PBC) buried deep in the brainstem —
but, even though that region had been discovered to be responsible for
triggering breathing in 1991, nobody was sure how it controlled
breathing’s rhythms. “The question that motivated all of this
work was, can we identify the key cell types and molecules that generate
breathing rhythm?” Yackle explains. By analyzing the genes expressed by
the different types of neurons within the breathing center, he and his
team pinpointed a tiny subgroup whose axons reached out to the “locus
coeruleus” — the brain’s headquarters for general anxiety.
The
idea, Yackle explains, is that these neurons form a bridge between the
brain’s breathing center and stress center, and they’re ultimately the
reason why our body’s breathing hacks — deep breaths for calmness, and
short breaths for arousal — actually work.
“We
think that, if you were hyperventilating, these neurons would be more
active, and then they would activate this other brain center more, which
would then cause more arousal. And then the opposite, if you had slow
breathing, you have less activation in the center, which would lead to
more calmness,” he says.
An
unexpected quirk of the subset of neurons, however, reveals just how
complex and sophisticated breathing really is, as National Institute of
Neurological Disorders and Stroke neuroscientist Jeffrey Smith, Ph.D.,
who wrote a perspective to accompany Yackle’s work in Science, pointed out to Inverse.
“The interesting thing is that the PBC is the inspiratory rhythm
generator, but these neurons that project to the locus coeruleus don’t
appear to be an essential part of the rhythm generation itself,” he
says. In other words, the only function of these neurons seems to be to
reach out and touch the brain’s stress center.
Yackle’s
team saw this when they eliminated those cells from the mouse brain
using genetic engineering: The resulting mice kept on breathing, but
their breathing was oddly, unnaturally calm. Putting that part
of the breathing center on mute, it seems, in turn, prevents the brain’s
stress center from getting activated — hence, slow-breathing zen mice.
To both Smith and Yackle, this is an indication that breathing is so
much more than just breathing; it looks like the brain, over
evolutionary time, developed specialized neurons for the sole purpose of
integrating breathing with higher-level functions, like experiencing
stress and emotions, or talking and singing.
“Think
about how breathing ultimately gets integrated with other behaviors,”
Smith says. “This happens automatically — laughing, crying, this all
involves control of breathing. And then, cognitively, singing, and what
we’re doing right now — we’re controlling breathing and interfacing it
with cognition to produce sounds, speech, and communication.”
Yackle
believes his team’s findings can, in addition to underscoring the link
between breathing and emotion, help shed light on how to treat issues
related to irregular breathing, like panic attacks. “People will begin
to hyperventilate and then they’ll go into a panic attack, and so we
think that if you could perhaps silence these cells, pharmacologically,
we could perhaps prevent the stress or anxiety or arousal that’s caused
by breathing,” he muses, referring back to his genetically modified,
calmly breathing mice.
“We didn’t do a very
detailed analysis of how they were after a year, but they certainly
continued to live and seemed okay,” he laughs.
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