You're Not Anxious - You're Just Not Breathing Right

How sitting disrupts your breath, your body, and your nervous system - and what to do about it!

If you find yourself suffering from anxiety, you're not alone. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, over 30% of US adults experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives. For teens, the rate is even higher, with about 32% experiencing an anxiety disorder.

But what if I told you there is one major cause of anxiety that rarely gets talked about that you can easily change, for free, to reduce anxiety in as little as 5 minutes a day? In this article, I'll not only show how one major cause of anxiety is faulty breathing patterns, but also what you can do about it right now to decrease anxiety.

You can also watch my Youtube video on this topic here!

What We Need To Know

The simplest way to describe breathing is expansion and relaxation. There are a LOT of muscles involved with breathing, and depending on the stimulus we're exposed to, different ones will work. At rest, it’s mostly the diaphragm and intercostal muscles (the ones between the ribs) working on the inhale, and a restful exhale is simply relaxing, allowing elastic tension in the system to recoil and empty the lungs. As the diaphragm contracts on the inhale, the ribs expand in all three dimensions, allowing the lungs to inflate fully, pushing the internal organs down, which is why we get an expansion in the belly (that happens for you, right?) But what people don't think about so much with breathing is the pelvic floor. Without getting too deep into the pelvic floor muscles, on a full relaxed inhale, the muscles ‘down there’ lengthen eccentrically to allow for space for the organs to go during that compression. Then, on exhale, those same muscles contract slightly on the rebound to help push the organs back upwards against the lungs to help them empty.

That's all at rest. When we're at rest, or at least easy bouts of exercise, this parasympathetic breathing response is beautiful for flushing out toxins, pumping all sorts of fluids through the body, and helping get oxygen to every cell in the body. This type of breathing even helps the peristalsis of the colon to help you poop. This type of breathing also helps to properly supply the brain with oxygen, and helps to regulate your hormones.

Stressed Breathing

To understand the difference between rested breathing vs stressed breathing, we need to talk about the brain a little bit. For simplicity, the front of our brain is the conscious, aware part of the brain. The back of the brain is the control center for all the automatic stuff of the body. Think about the difference between deciding what to cook, versus deciding to make your heart beat; the front of the brain can make conscious decisions, and the back of the brain turns on to keep us alive.

Now back to stress. If a lion jumps out of the bush to chase you, before the front brain can react, the back of the brain detects the threat and gets your body to run faster than you could think to do it. One of the ways it does that is to switch the diaphragm and pelvic floor from breathing muscles to stabilizers and stiffeners of the spine to get the heck away as fast as you can, or brace for a fight. In that case, what do you use to breathe? The neck and chest shift upwards to pull the lungs open in order to get as rapid a breathing rate as possible to survive. It’s a fantastic mechanism to work really hard for short amounts of time. This type of breathing allows us to live, but is catabolic to our system, and over the long term, things break down faster than they repair, and we end up with chronic pain and chronic disease.

Here's the important takeaway from this rest vs stress breathing: this patterning is a two way street! If you're stressed out, and you take deep slow breaths, it calms you down. BUT, the inverse is also true! If you hyperventilate on purpose, you can ramp your heartrate up significantly, like a shot of espresso to your nervous system. The reason for this is simple: Your brain stem is responsible for monitoring levels of oxygen and CO2 constantly. If you're at rest, the brain stem sees the levels of oxygen as a sign of rest, and it kicks on all the digestion, elimination and play we want in our lives. If that proverbial lion is chasing you, and CO2 increases, the breathing rate speeds up a LOT, trying to get as much oxygen in the system as it can, as fast as it can to get you away from the threat. If the gas exchange is off just a little bit, the brain stem is sensitive enough that it then starts to create a low level fight or flight response to get you to get away from the danger.

A low level fight or flight response is a great way to describe anxiety, isn't it? And I know a great way to create a disruption in the oxygen and CO2 exchange rate that would lead to this type of low level fight or flight response. Something you do on a daily basis to yourself, unknowingly creating the anxiety in your system!

Sitting. When you sit, the rib cage is compressed to the point where the ribs can no longer expand maximally, reducing the ability of that diaphragm to contract. Sitting also puts your pelvic floor under compression tension, leading to the lack of downward mobility of the diaphragm and internal organs! So, if you can't breathe down, your body has that back up system of breathing into the chest, neck and face. All the same muscles you’d use when you're under threat, leading to the o2/CO2 imbalance that leads the brain stem to turn on anxiety.

And if we experienced this without technology, we'd hear this signal and do something about it! But most of the time we're so enamoured with screens that we don't actually experience the brainstem signal. That leads to that low level threat to get trapped in the system, and run in the background. Hello CHRONIC anxiety!

Now let's talk about how to fix this.

Sitting is a Sport - Let’s Train For It

It would be so easy to view the solution as simply avoiding or reducing the amount we sit. It would be true, but not only unreasonable, it would be hypocritical as I will have sat for nearly 4 hours researching and writing this article. We’re not getting away from sitting anytime soon. Nor are long car rides and sitting on planes going away anytime soon. So let’s be a little more practical with how we sit.

Posture matters when we sit. If you’re hunched over, rounded shoulders, forward head, you are actively creating a shape that the body adapts to over time. It’s as if when you stand up, you’re taking the chair and the resulting breathing patterns with you. So the first step is to understand how to sit with proper ergonomics and spinal position to minimize the effects of sitting on the spine and diaphragm.

When you’re sitting, the pelvis should not rock backwards. Instead, we must learn how to rock the pelvis into a neutral position. This can be learned easily with your hands, and a little bit of imagination. Start by placing your hands on your pelvis, finding the front (ASIS) with your finger tips, and the back (PSIS) with your thumbs. Next, imagine that your pelvis is a bucket of water, and your hands are now holding the rim. What we DON’T want is to pour that water out the back of the bucket. What we’re looking for is to slightly tip the pelvis forward just enough to pour water out of the front without dumping it all at the same time. If your hands are sensitive, or you can do this near a mirror, we’re looking for the front fingers to be just under the back thumbs. If you’re a nerd, the pelvic tilt should be somewhere between 4-10 degrees anterior (4-7 for men, 7-10 for women).

What this positioning does is neutralize the ligament tension throughout the pelvis, and support the spine foundationally from the bottom. If the pelvis tips too far forward or back, ligaments of the spine begin to lengthen and loosen, causing instability and an increased demand for the diaphragm to become a spinal stabilizer, even when sitting doing nothing! Or, we’ll create increasing demand over time for more and more supportive chairs.

We’ve also got to talk about head position when it comes to sitting. The screen should be directly at eye level to avoid looking down which rounds the cervical spine, flattening the curve and increasing the tension on the accessory breathing muscles of the neck. Aim for the head being right in line with the rib cage and pelvis. To visualize that, imagine the ears directly over the shoulders. By pulling the head back level like this, you should feel the shoulders relax backwards over the rib cage as the chest rises.

Unglue the Rib Cage

We talked about how sitting compresses the rib cage and the pelvic floor. But one thing it also does is to change the length tension relationships of the front and back of the body, leading to the back ligaments getting longer, and the front ligaments getting shorter. Why this is important to understand is that these ligaments are tasked with holding your posture without the muscles working. And it only takes about 15 minutes of holding a position to cause the ligaments to ‘creep’ into these positions.

Ever stood up after a long sit, let’s say a plane ride or long bout of working at the computer, and felt like your back muscles felt weak? That’s because they’re needing to do much more work than they should because those back ligaments have actually lengthened themselves to accommodate your sitting posture.

So, instead of blaming the back muscles for working overtime, the goal is to lengthen and open the front of the ribs; to give space to the diaphragm and intercostals so they can expand the lungs optimally.

One easy way to do that is to ‘drape’ yourself on a foam roller longitudinally (tailbone on one end and head on the other), and breathe comfortably for 10-15 minutes, allowing the ligaments of the spine and ribs to rearrange themselves more functionally.

Another way is to actively massage underneath and between the ribs to release the connective tissues that keep the rib cage blocked. I’ve seen many tools to aid with this, but I do find that using your own fingers helps the brain figure out how to find and keep these trigger points from forming in the first place.

Breathe into your Butt

To recap, your body’s perception of threats (that don’t exist) lead to anxiety. One of the ways we create a low level threat is not getting enough air into the pelvic floor, to feel that elastic recoil in our survival center. This wide knee child's pose is a fantastic way to maximize the pelvic floor expansion and contraction. It works because the forward bend opens the lower back and hips, while wide knees reduce pelvic floor tension, allowing for full expansion.

Starting on your hands and knees, take the knees slightly wider than the hips, and angle the lower legs in towards each other. Rock backwards as far as you can, rounding the spine without pain, and hold the end position. Breathe wide and low, imagining your glutes inflating sideways from the inhale, and simply let go of tension on the exhale, allowing the elastic recoil of everything to push the air out. I aim for 2-5 minutes of this only, as any longer and we could start to overstretch ligaments again.

I also make sure to work some form of extension right after, like prone cobra, superman, or simply standing arm circles. Just to reset the extension mechanism of the spine back to baseline.

One Last Note About Anxiety

Through this article, I’ve talked about gas exchanges, breathing mechanics, and sitting too much. But one thing I want to highlight is that perception is the mother of your reality. I’ve heard people say that FEAR is false evidence appearing real. I’ve shown that sitting with a compressed pelvis presents a gas exchange issue to the brain stem, causing it to perceive stress when nothing is happening, meaning sitting causes low levels of fear in the system. But what I haven’t talked about is the quality of what you’re doing when you’re sitting that can have an exponential effect on this.

For example, while I sit to write this article, I’ve got a clear desk, a view of trees and clear skies, and a good full belly. I set a timer to stand up once an hour, and do pre and post stretches to not take the desk and chair shape with me through the rest of my life. But what if everything else was the same, but instead of writing this article, I was consuming the news? Or switching to reactive mode like I do when I consume social media?

An analogy I give clients is to imagine walking down the street on a nice beautiful spring day. Birds are chirping and all that jazz. Suddenly, hundreds of people run screaming towards you and past you. In most cases, whether you want to or not, every cell in your body will be prompting you to run with them, with no conscious awareness of why they are running and screaming. Prompting stress and anxiety, simply because others around you are in the same state.

Sitting is already bad enough for anxiety, and we can choose how to sit, and what to do before and after so we don’t take the anxiety chair with us. But just like choosing to breathe differently makes a big impact, choosing what you consume with your sitting time can make a dramatic difference as well.

If you liked this, check out my course at Four Lights Wellness, where I cover both physical and mental aspects of wellness: Healing (e)Motions: Trauma Release Exercises for People with Stress offers targeted physiological exercises aimed at reducing stress and mental health dysfunctions that can contribute to physical pain.