Hyperventilating and Anxiety: Symptom or Cause?
Reducing Anxiety with Shallow Breathing Techniques
I’ve been experiencing a fair amount of anxiety lately between my ongoing divorce proceedings, my layoff and job search, the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, and more. Although I don’t think of myself as an anxious person, I was recently made aware of the fact that my body’s instinctive coping mechanisms, along with some common advice for reducing anxiety, have been counterproductive, even making my anxiety worse.
A common piece of advice for reducing anxiety is to “take a deep breath” or to “breathe deeply.” This advice, however well intended it may be, can actually make your anxiety worse. In response to anxiety-causing situations, I have, in the past, often found myself taking a deep breath and exhaling quickly with a sigh, perhaps over and over again as a means of self-soothing. I had an epiphany while sitting on the couch the other day, however, prompting me to do some research on anxiety and breathing techniques.
While sitting on the couch watching a movie, the day after a couple of particularly anxiety-causing days, I found myself feeling quite relaxed and calm. I noticed that my breathing was not deep or rapid, but even and shallow. As it turned out, this shallow breathing itself was contributing to my relaxed, anxiety-free state of mind. Although it is a normal physiological response to breathe deeply and more rapidly while under duress, there is a fine line between deep/rapid breathing and hyperventilating. This rapid breathing itself can actually cause additional anxiety, inducing a fear or panic response in your mind and body. This produces a kind of negative feedback mechanism in which your anxiety causes your breathing to accelerate and deepen, further increasing your anxiety, thus producing a kind of self-propagating anxiety-filled physical and emotional state.
Yesterday I experimented with consciously keeping my breathing shallow and even when situations arose that would otherwise cause my anxiety to increase. I found that I was able to successfully control and reduce my anxiety by controlling my breathing, not letting my breathing get into a runaway state of deep or rapid breathing, resisting my urge to breathe deeply or to let out a big sigh in exhaling. My entire day ended up calmer, happier, and smoother, in almost every respect. It made me realize just how much of our emotional wellbeing supervenes on (i.e., is determined by) what is happening to us physiologically, even in something as seemingly autonomic as breathing.
This revelation about the efficacy of controlling my breathing at reducing or preventing anxiety raises an interesting question, about breathing and anxiety in particular but perhaps about other emotional/physiological connections in general: How does one distinguish between a physical symptom and a physical cause of any particular state. I had always presumed that my rapid/deep breathing patterns were a symptom of anxiety, whether as a coping technique or as a physiological effect of being in a state of anxiety. But it turns out that rapid/deep breathing patterns themselves can actually cause a heightened state of anxiety by trigging additional physiological panic responses. In other words, poor breathing techniques are not merely a symptom of anxiety but sometimes the cause—if not the sole cause, then at least a contributing cause—of a person’s anxiety as well.
Obviously the effect of your breathing on your mental or emotional state is a type of bottom-up or body-to-mind causation. The fact that we can, to some extent, choose to control our breathing with our own willpower makes me wonder philosophically about whether controlling one’s own breathing techniques should properly count as a case of top-down or mind-to-body causation. If so, then perhaps there is a much tighter connection, specifically a causal connection, between our mental states and our physiological states than we are generally paying attention to.
In my own attempts to regulate my emotional states through intentionally controlling my breathing techniques, I find that the relationship between my mental or emotional state and my body’s physiological responses is more bidirectional than unidirectional. Clearly my physiological state can affect my mood, my mental state, and/or my emotional state. But I also seem to have some degree of control over my body’s physiological responses, in this case by nipping the runaway breathing/anxiety feedback loop in the bud by choosing to breathe more shallowly and regularly than deeply or rapidly.
If you yourself experience anxiety and find yourself instinctively coping by taking deep or rapid breaths, try forcing yourself to breath shallowly and a bit more evenly. I found that I was able to significantly reduce my anxiety level after just a few seconds of breathing more shallowly, even more so if I was also able to clear my mind of any verbal thoughts, instead focusing almost entirely on controlling my breathing. While your mileage may vary, the mere act of controlling my own breathing is proving remarkably effective at regulating my emotional state, causing a state of calmness and wherewithal as opposed to a state of runaway anxiety, panic, or nervousness.
Even if the larger philosophical issues about the mind-body problem and mental causation remain unresolved, or at least outside the scope of this blog post, it was highly useful to make the practical discovery that the common advice to “take a deep breath” is dead-wrong, or at least counterproductive for me. Shallow breathing is the key, if you want to reduce your overall level of anxiety, put your emotions and your mental state back under your own control, and reclaim your calmness and your inner peace at the same time.
For Further Reading:
Just Breathe: Mastering Breathwork by Dan Brulé
