What your breathing does to your nervous system

One Tuesday last November, in a windowless meeting room near the old port, a man in his fifties informed me that he did not have three minutes to spare. I asked him to stay in his chair and lengthen his out-breath, changing nothing else. Three minutes later he opened his eyes and his voice had dropped a notch. He did not look especially pleased about it. I see this a lot. We all carry that physiological lever around with us, and most of us never once use it on purpose.

I explain the mechanism most weeks of the year, in Marseille offices or barefoot in the sand at Pointe Rouge. I will put it here the way I put it in a session, without the clever vocabulary nobody remembers, along with the protocol I always hand over first.

Two modes, one body

Your autonomic nervous system looks after everything you do not decide: heart rate, digestion, the width of your blood vessels, sweating. It has two branches. The sympathetic one mobilises, speeds things up, gets you ready to act. The parasympathetic one slows the heart, restarts digestion and allows repair and sleep. People often ask me which of the two is the good one, and the question mildly irritates me, because an active sympathetic system is exactly what lets you meet a deadline or paddle into the mistral instead of giving up after ten metres. What wears you down is staying over there from morning to night, never crossing back. The signs look much the same from one person to the next.

• Breathing climbs into the upper chest, shortens, and slips over to the mouth without you noticing.
• The jaw clenches. So does the neck, with nothing mechanical to justify it.
• Digestion goes off and appetite scatters, nothing all day and then everything at ten in the evening.
• Sleep breaks up around four in the morning, and attention hops from task to task for the whole of the following day.

Why lengthening the exhale changes something

Breathing has this peculiarity about it: of all those automatic functions, it is the one whose controls you can take back whenever you decide to. You breathe in, the heart speeds up a little. You breathe out, it slows down. That swing exists in everyone and carries a rather grand name, respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Lengthening the exhale gives more room to the slowing phase and draws on the vagus nerve pathway, the one carrying the recovery message. There is research on heart rate variability, I will not summarise it here, I am not a researcher. In a session, what people describe to me is more ordinary: a voice that comes down, hands that warm up.

Ten minutes on office chairs

In a workshop I rarely begin with the breath. I go round the room first, and I always hear the same thing: days chopped into fifteen pieces, lunch swallowed in front of a screen. Then we breathe together for ten minutes, sitting on the chairs that are already there, with no mats and no ambient music, which makes me want to walk out. The first three minutes are noisy, someone coughs, a phone buzzes in a pocket. Around the fifth, the quiet changes texture. By the end there is nearly always a pause in which nobody wants to speak first, and that pause is what I come for: it shows the group, without a word of explanation, that an inner state can shift while nothing in the room has moved at all. One participant told me on her way out that she had simply felt it was possible.

The extended-exhale protocol

1. 01Sit down, spine long, feet on the floor. No need to straighten up like a soldier, just aim not to be slumped onto your ribs.
2. 02One hand on the belly, the other on the ribs. Breathe three or four times the way you usually do, watching where the movement happens.
3. 03Breathe in through the nose for a count of four, belly opening first, ribs following.
4. 04Breathe out through the nose for a count of six, slowly and evenly, as though you were emptying a glass. Nobody blows out a candle for six seconds.
5. 05Hold nothing in between. If six leaves you short of breath, drop to three and five. The exhale has to outlast the inhale, its absolute length matters not at all.
6. 06Five minutes, once or twice a day, at a set time. It took me years to admit that quiet repetition does all the work and that one heroic Sunday evening session makes up for nothing.

I say it in every session: breathing cures nothing, it replaces neither a doctor nor a therapist, and I will not let anyone leave believing otherwise. What it gives you is a few minutes of grip on your own inner state, using what you already have on you. Four counts in, six counts out, five minutes. Along the Corniche it is lovely, though I have also done it in an underground car park before a meeting and it worked exactly the same.