When you’re stressed, people often advise you to take a deep breath — and for good reason, a new study shows. Slowing your breathing calms you, and now scientists may have figured out how you can relax your brain through your breath. It has to do with your brain’s pacemaker for breath.
For anyone looking for ways to deal with stress and negative emotions, that’s big news. Although it’s been generally known that breathing exercises can have a calming affect on emotions, the researchers’ findings could provide a scientific explanation for why hyperventilation makes us anxious, or why breathing slowly can calm us down.
“It has considerable potential for therapeutic use.”
The findings stem from ongoing research on the respiratory or breathing pacemaker, a cluster of neurons in the brainstem. Called the pre-Bötzinger complex (or preBötC), it was initially discovered in mice in 1991 by study co-author Jack Feldman, a professor of neurology at UCLA. Since then, the structure has been identified and studied in humans. Feldman and study co-authors Mark Krasnow and Kevin Yackle have also identified and studied the preBötC neurons in mice that affect sighing in 2016. Their latest findings continue this research, focusing more on how these neurons affect breathing, emotional states, and alertness, which scientists call arousal.
“It’s a tie between breathing itself and changes in emotional state and arousal that we had never looked at before,” says Feldman. “It has considerable potential for therapeutic use.”