We’ve known for generations that we can self-soothe by drawing in some nice deep breaths and exhaling slow breaths.
Slow breathing helps regulate our emotions, and people who utilize practices like yoga and mindfulness have been found to generally be happier and calmer souls. But despite the age-old practice science has taken a little while to work out exactly how these better breathing exercises help our mental state.
That was until now.
Neuroscientists at the Salk Institute in California have for the first time identified a brain circuit that regulates breathing voluntarily. Using mice, the researchers pinpointed a group of brain cells in the frontal cortex that connects to the brainstem, where vital actions like breathing are controlled.
Their findings suggest this connection between the more sophisticated parts of the brain and the lower brainstem’s breathing center allows us to coordinate our breathing with our current behaviors and emotional state.
The findings, published this month in Nature Neuroscience, describe a new set of brain cells and molecules that could be targeted with therapeutics to prevent hyperventilation and regulate anxiety, panic, or post-traumatic stress disorders.
“The body naturally regulates itself with deep breaths, so aligning our breathing with our emotions seems almost intuitive to us — but we didn’t really know how this worked in the brain,” – senior author Sung Han.
“By uncovering a specific brain mechanism responsible for slowing breathing, our discovery may offer a scientific explanation for the beneficial effects of practices like yoga and mindfulness on alleviating negative emotions, grounding them further in science.”
Breathing patterns are affected by our emotional state, think of the classic case of a person hyperventilating when being overcome by emotion, but up until this study was conducted the science of why that happens was a mystery.
That was until the Salk team took a crack at the case.
Their experiments revealed a potential new breathing circuit (called the anterior cingulate cortex-pons-medulla circuit) that when activated in mice became calmer and breathed more slowly. When the mice were in anxiety-inducing situations the communication through this connection decreased, and breathing rates went up.
The researchers will continue analyzing the circuit to determine whether a drug (playfully dubbed a “yoga pill” by the researchers) could activate it to slow breathing and initiate a peaceful, meditative state.
In the meantime, here’s a really good resource for better breathing techniques.
