Breath

The body's keyboard

Your heartbeat, digestion, blood pressure, hormones and stress response all run automatically. You can't tell your heart to slow down or your adrenal glands to stop releasing cortisol. But there is one key on the keyboard you can press on purpose: breath. Breath is both automatic and voluntary — the doorway between the conscious and unconscious parts of you.

The autonomic nervous system has two main branches:

• Sympathetic — the accelerator: alertness, energy, fight or flight.
• Parasympathetic — the brake: rest, digestion, repair, connection. The vagus nerve is its main pathway.

Inhaling nudges the accelerator; exhaling presses the brake. Pace, depth, holds, and nose versus mouth all send different messages up to the brain. The brain reads your breath as a report on whether you are safe — so when you change the breath, you change the story the body tells itself.

That's why breath comes first. Stress, anxiety, anger, overwhelm, shutdown — each has a breathing pattern. Change the pattern and the state follows. Practised daily, you retrain the nervous system itself, and with it the lens through which you experience reality.