Understanding the Psychophysiology of Slow Yogic Breathing With Sat Bir Khalsa, Ph.D.

One of most fundamental and common breathing practices within yoga is the long, slow, deep breathing pattern. In a number of studies of yoga practice, slow yogic breathing has been a practice that beginners often immediately begin to adopt and benefit from in their daily lives as a valuable coping and health strategy. It has also made its way into modern Western medicine as a fairly well know relaxation practice referred to as slow breathing, abdominal breathing or belly breathing.

Biomedical scientific research on slow breathing has begun to reveal the substantial impact it has on both mental and physical functioning. On the physical level, it has direct impact on the autonomic nervous system, where it can reduce sympathetic activity, blood pressure and heart rate and increase heart rate variability. It can also change characteristics of respiratory functioning including changes in the chemoreflex response and improvement in gas exchange. Slow breathing research is also showing direct impact on the central nervous system, with positive changes in stress, emotion and pain regulation. Clinical research is beginning to show its efficacy in disorders such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and hypertension.

Some of Life With Breath Podcast Transcript

05:43
Welcome back everyone. Today we have the amazing Sat Bir Khalsa with us. Without any further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Sat Bir Khalsa. Welcome, Sat Bir. Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

16:08
So, in today's world 2021, we see various different illnesses that seem to be stress related, disruption to the nervous system, disruption to the natural rhythm of the human organism, and you've been able to create psychophysics physiological platforms to bring people back into balance. What does that look like today? What's the normal client that you see today? What's the prescription that you generally are prescribing right off the bat to folks?

16:48
Well, you know, I'm not, I'm actually not a clinician, so I don't do prescription. But, you know, if, if, if people ask me the general questions, so you know, so, you know, how did you ever work? And what's it good for? I really have to say that the most important and immediate benefit that people experience from yoga practice is management of their stress, their stress tolerance, their stress, coping ability, their resilience, to stress, their ability to bounce back. And that really is is is of most value. And that's because, you know, we are in modern society undergoing a real epidemic of chronic stress. And chronic stress goes really deep. I mean, it is the basis and a strong contributor to many, many disorders and diseases, especially mental health conditions. And so our modern society really doesn't have much of a solution to that, except for, you know, pharmaceuticals. And Yoga is a behavioral practice that allows people to prevent that stress and prevent the onset of these types of disorders. So that is really a critical thing is that, that when you practice these techniques, it's prevention, it's really allowing you to cope effectively, it's making you a better functioning human being. And that's going to reduce your disease burden. It's also going to on the other side, it's going to improve positive psychological states, it's going to improve your state of well being your your comfort, your quality of life, and it even to some degree, your spirituality.

27:54
Why do you think that out of all the senses the breath seems to have the most profound effect on the mind and body?

28:08
Well, that's a great question. It's a great question why is it that we can control the breath and then influence our internal state and this whole idea of influencing an internal state is you know, a form of self regulation, the ability to through these yogic practices to control our internal state. And you know, pranayama is just one of those techniques we do the same thing when we meditate do we do the same thing when we do asanas but I suppose one thing about the the breathing pattern is is that we know even in mammals that there's obviously a very strong connection between internal psychological state and our breathing pattern. So we know when we get fearful our breath rate increases becomes more shallow we know that when we're sleeping, our breath slows down we know that when we become passionate about something our breath takes on a different breathing pattern crying is associated with a whole you know very different breathing patterns. So its basically driving the system in reverse.

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