How to Breathe Properly: Tuning Your Breath to Increase Clarity, Calmness, and Alertness

How do you breathe properly?

Is there a “correct way” of breathing? In fact, there is.

This guide highlights the principles of proper breathing as explained in ancient traditions.

These principles can help you reduce anxiety, improve your energy, enhance mental clarity, and strengthen emotional resilience.

May they serve you well.

Let’s dive in …

What is Proper Breathing?

Proper breathing is natural breathing.

It’s how we breathe without any internal disruptions like emotional tension or external disruptions like the news that influence our physiology.

Essentially, it’s how we breathe as babies before our conscious mind gets in the way—before a lifetime of poor habits and conditioning.

The Benefits of Proper Breathing

Breathing affects all of our bodily systems, feelings, and moods in profound ways.

In an age where most of us are in a constant state of anxiety—proper breathing helps to:

  • Reduce emotional stress and anxiety
  • Enhance mental clarity and focus
  • Strengthen emotional resilience and self-regulation
  • Increase our energy
  • Improve our resilience to disease
  • Enhance cognitive functioning

Learning how to breathe properly is something that can provide anyone tremendous benefits. Plus, it’s free and it’s your birthright.

The Results of Improper Breathing

It’s not healthy or sustainable to live in a state of constant mental and emotional stress or anxiety. Neurosis is not supposed to be a “way of life” for any of us.

Constant emotional stress translates to an over-activation of the sympathetic nervous system.1“Understanding the stress response, Harvard Health Publishing, 2020. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response

This over-activation taxes our nervous system, which eventually weakens our immune response.

In addition to making us more prone to getting sick, it also leads to chronic fatigue, brain fog, and more erratic emotional expression.

Proper breathing reverses this process.

How Does Proper Breathing Work?

By activating the parasympathetic nervous system, proper breathing promotes inner calm and physical relaxation.

The brain uses up to three times as much oxygen as our muscles do.

Proper breathing increases the oxygen in our bloodstream, making more oxygen available to our brains. This improves brain function, which translates to more physical energy and mental clarity.

By learning to direct your attention to your breath, you can condition yourself to shift out of stressful, depressed, and aggressive states and enter relaxed, calm, and resourceful mental states.

The short-term benefits are obvious: you become better equipped to handle difficult situations, manage conflicts, and maintain focus while you work.

Because effective breathing improves your body’s response to stress, its long-term benefits include longevity and a higher quality of life.

Self-Test: Are You Breathing Properly?

Here’s a quick test:

Place your left hand over your navel and your right hand over your chest.

Breathe normally (however you usually breathe without thinking about it).

Which hand(s) is moving? Left, right, or both?

If only the hand over your chest is moving, you probably have a shallow breath. That is, you’re drawing insufficient oxygen when you breathe. This leads to fatigue and increases the chances of anxiety.

If the hand over your navel is moving, you’re probably breathing properly (at least more so).  This is called diaphragmatic breathing.

To breathe from your belly, you need to expand and contract your diaphragm, which provides more oxygen to your lungs.

If both hands are moving while you breathe, you probably have a combination of the two (which is fine).

how to breathe properly

Why It’s Necessary to Learn How to Breathe Properly

From one perspective it seems somewhat silly:

Why do you need to learn how to breathe properly? Don’t you do that involuntarily?

Breathing is both a voluntary and involuntary function.

Involuntary breathing is an automatic bodily process. Voluntary breathing occurs when you bring your awareness to the process of breathing.

Infants don’t yet have the cognitive capacity to breathe voluntarily. We enter this world breathing involuntarily. And as infants, we breathe beautifully. No lessons are needed.

Have you ever watched a baby sleeping? The baby’s belly inflates like a balloon with every inhale. The baby breathes slowly, deeply, quietly, and steadily. We are born breathing diaphragmatically.

So What Happens?

Emotions—mostly negative emotions like fear (trauma).

Science is just beginning to understand the effects emotions have on our brain and the autonomic nervous system.2Kop WJ, Synowski SJ, Newell ME, Schmidt LA, Waldstein SR, Fox NA. Autonomic nervous system reactivity to positive and negative mood induction: the role of acute psychological responses and frontal electrocortical activity. Biol Psychol. 2011;86(3):230–238. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.12.003

Children are containers for their parent’s emotions. Whatever they feel, their children absorb.

And so slowly, infants begin to adopt their parent’s anxieties and the disrupted emotional field of whoever is around them.

As soon as they do, they begin to breathe like their parents: shallow, often audible breaths, mostly from the chest.

It’s as if incorrect breathing is taught subconsciously, from generation to generation.

How to Breathe Properly: Nose or Mouth?

Before we dive into the principles of proper breathing, let’s address a common question: should you breathe from your nose or your mouth?

Most people will agree that inhalation should be from the nose, but I’ve seen some instructions (mainly from Westerners) that say you should exhale from the mouth.

Both the Eastern traditions and my own experience suggest this is incorrect. It is best to both inhale and exhale from the nose for proper breathing.

Breathing with your nose gives you better control of your breath and warms the air when you inhale.

Nose breathing provides the optimum level of relaxation that helps steady and stabilize the mind.

The mouth should be mostly closed when you’re breathing with your lips just gently touching.

Proper Tongue Positioning

Gently place your tongue on the palate where the back of your front teeth meets the roof of your mouth.

This is considered the proper tongue posture.3Normal Tongue Posture by Prof John Mew, 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmZZfO0hXLo

The tongue is supposed to remain against the palate most of the time—except when eating, drinking, and talking.

This will help you relax your jaw while also promoting more steady breathing.

From an energetic perspective, this tongue position helps excessive energy in the head move into an energy channel that runs down the front of the body (called the REN meridian). When excessive energy is stored in the head region it can lead to overthinking and mental exhaustion.

4 Principles of Proper Breathing

As we said, “proper breathing” is natural breathing.

In learning how to breathe properly, you are consciously restoring what once came naturally to you.

Here are four qualities related that illustrate how to breathe properly:

  1. Quiet
  2. Deep
  3. Steady
  4. Slow

Let’s take a closer look at each of these four qualities, one by one.

proper breathing

The Principle of Nonaction

But first, we need to quickly address a vital principle from the Eastern traditions.

These traditions understood that you can’t bring about positive changes through force of will.

They understood the nature of the psyche: what we resist grows stronger.

Instead, in Taoism for example, they adopt a principle called Wu Wei. 

Wu Wei translates to nonaction, nongoverning, or nondoing.

Buddhism has a similar concept to Wu Wei called the Middle Way.

While the ego wants something to do, Wu Wei suggests that we take an observing role instead.

This observing role allows things within us to revert to what’s natural without our volition.

Anything we do to try to change or improve our breathing will ultimately lead to something unnatural.

Why? Because it’s coming from the mind’s prior conditioning, which is always unnatural. The Taoists call it “mundane conditioning.”

So I’ll keep referring back to the principle of Wu Wei as it’s essential if you want to return to proper breathing.

Principle #1: Quiet Your Breath

If you take some time to observe your breath, you’ll notice a direct relationship between your breathing patterns and your thoughts.

Coarse, erratic, and louder breathing coincides with racing thoughts, rumination, and various neurotic tendencies.

As your breath becomes imperceptible and quiet, you’ll notice your thought stream receding into the background, turning into a mere trickle. (Sometimes, the thoughts seem to stop altogether.)

That’s how powerful proper breathing is.

Now, to quiet your breath, do not force the air on your exhale, and do not rush to draw the air in on the inhale.

In ancient traditions, you’ll often hear instructions like, “Rest your mind on the breath.”

This is a meditative technique that helps you quiet your mind at the beginning of your meditation practice.

The important thing to remember is that you’re using awareness to slowly change the quality of your breath. (Remember: Wu Wei, or nonaction.)

proper breathing

Bahui Point located at the crown of the head

Proper body alignment also helps you further quiet your breathing:

  • Imagine your head suspended above your spine with a golden cord extending from the crown of your head into the sky.
  • Gently tuck your chin (which will slightly elevate your crown).
  • Avoid slouching your shoulders or arching your lower back.
  • If you’re sitting in a chair or standing, keep both feet firmly on the ground.

Oftentimes, our breath is audible because our upper vertebrae are out of alignment. Usually, this occurs because our head is collapsed.

To learn all the key elements of proper posture and alignment for standing, see this guide on Zhan Zhuang, and for proper sitting alignments see this guide on the best meditation postures.

Principle #2: Breathe Deeply

Breathing deeply means breathing with your belly instead of your chest. In Eastern traditions, it’s often referred to as “womb breathing.”

Remember that chest breathing promotes anxiety and emotional imbalance; belly breathing promotes relaxation.

With belly breathing, as you inhale, the air is drawn into your lower abdomen.

In many breathing techniques, you’re instructed to imagine a balloon expanding in the belly region (but without any force).

Then, exhale and allow the balloon to slowly and steadily deflate. Be sure not to force the air out of the balloon. Simply allow the air to release naturally. Relaxation comes mainly from the exhale, not the inhale.

But again, there’s a difference between trying to breathe properly and breathing properly.

Allowing the Breath to Sink into the Lower Torso

After the breath quiets down, we’re going to keep gentle and neutral observation on the process of breathing. In doing so, the breath will begin to sink on its own.

Some people breathe into their head region. Others breathe from their neck and shoulders. Or, they may breathe from their upper chest.

Wherever you were breathing before, by allowing the breath to quiet down (principle #1) it will begin to sink lower.

Eventually, it will sink into its natural place in the lower torso—about two figure widths below the navel.

lower dantian eat less

Sometimes it’s also helpful to place one or both of your hands over your navel as we did in the experiment above. Again, avoid using any force.

Simply observe the process of breathing. Allow the breath to sink on its own.

And if your breathing doesn’t want to “sink” into your lower abdomen, that’s okay too.

Just notice from what region you’re breathing—nasal passage, throat, upper chest, lower chest, and so on.

Over time, if you continue to just “witness your breath,” you’ll find it sinking lower into your abdomen.

Principle #3: Breathe Steadily

Generally speaking, your breathing should be rhythmic, steady, and at ease.

The time of your inhales should roughly match the pace of your exhales.

The challenge with “counting your breathing” to make them match up is that you’re once again training your body to do something unnatural.

I did loads of these exercises in my 20s. They seemed to be helpful at the time, but in retrospect, they ultimately created more tension in my body that I had to later work through with better principles and methods.

Please keep that in mind: Forced breathing techniques run the risk of conditioning more tension into your body, which you don’t want to do.

Be sure that you’re not feeling any tension or force as you breathe in the manner described here.

As your breath sinks and settles down in your lower abdomen, it will naturally become smoother, steadier, and more rhythmic. As a consequence, you will feel more at ease.

Principle #4: Breathe Slowly

The goal here is to allow each inhale and exhale as long as possible without effort or straining.

When you begin to pay closer attention to your process of breathing, you may discover that you’re unconsciously stopping yourself from fully exhaling and/or fully inhaling.

This is very common. Once again, it’s a result of habitual mental and emotional tension that became anchored in your body many years ago.

Most adults in a resting state breathe an average of 12 to 18 cycles per minute. This translates to a complete inhale and exhale cycle of three to five seconds.

Trained internal martial artists, in contrast, extend a single breath cycle to 15 seconds, comfortably completing only four cycles in a minute.

The fewer cycles per minute, the better. A slow breath cycle coincides with greater awareness, alertness, centeredness, and relaxation.

You can train your body to breathe at slower and slower rates, but again, it’s best to allow this process to happen naturally by observing the process.

As the breath becomes more “at ease,” your parasympathetic nervous system takes over, and your breathing cycles begin to slow down.

Learning How to Breathe Properly

The key to adopting any new skill is to follow an effective method with as much awareness and gentle focus as possible.

So for this exercise, place your full attention on the process of breathing while keeping the qualities of proper breathing we discuss in the back of your mind.

How Long Does it Take to Breathe Properly?

You don’t need to invest a great deal of time to learn how to breathe properly.

One conscious breath is worth more than 100 unconscious ones.

By placing your full attention on your breath, you’re helping to reestablish the quality of natural breathing in your body.

Patience and practice, however, are required.

If you can invest 10 or 15 minutes, once or twice a day to practice what’s described above, within a few weeks or months, you’ll likely notice positive changes in your breathing patterns.

How to Quiet Your Mind

The very process of observing your breathing without trying to change anything can often quiet your mind.

A quiet mind is less agitated by emotions and more receptive to learning.

Once you’ve retrained yourself to breathe properly, you will once again breathe correctly without conscious awareness.

Pay Attention to Internal Changes

Whenever you consciously breathe, notice how you feel. Observe any tingling or other sensations in your head or body.

See if you feel more relaxed and calmer than before your practice.

Paying attention to the effects of your practice provides the feedback necessary for effective learning.

Plus, you’ll notice the benefits when you breathe correctly, anchoring the positive experience into your subconscious. This will fuel your progress.

If you don’t pay attention to the results you’re experiencing, you’ll find little reason to continue experimenting and practicing when the novelty wears off.

Breathing Exercise: The Natural Tranquilizer

Now that we’ve explored the principles of proper breathing, I thought I’d provide a different “breathing technique” for contrast.

This technique violates the breathing principles highlighted above. But it’s still highly effective in a pinch.

It’s more for a “quick fix” for when you’re feeling anxious and you haven’t conditioned yourself for proper breathing yet.

This particular method is good to do when you want to relax, before bed, or before meditating. Dr. Andrew Weil calls it a “natural tranquilizer” in his audio program, Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing.4Available on Audible.

  1. Sit with your back straight, head looking in front of you. Your tongue gently presses against the roof of your mouth. Close your mouth, not tightly but loosely.
  2. Inhale slowly, steadily, and deeply (into your belly) through your nose for a count of 4. Your inhale should be steady and consistent for the entire 4-count.
  3. Hold your breath for a count of 7.
  4. Exhale through your mouth, again slowly, calmly, and steadily, making a slight whoosh sound. Exhale for a count of 8. Be sure not to push the air out forcefully when exhaling.

This completes a single 4-7-8 breath. Repeat this cycle three more times to complete your first session.

The Ratio of 4-7-8

For this particular technique, the duration you spend counting isn’t important; the ratio of time (4-7-8) is. After a matter of weeks or months, you’ll be able to slow down your count or double it to an 8-14-16 count.

You may feel lightheaded when you first use this method, but this sensation passes.

Weil recommends doing four cycles of the 4-7-8 breath twice a day, moving to eight cycles once you get comfortable with the method.

But again, although it works, I would argue in the long run, it’s far better to retrain your body for natural breathing.

Recap: How to Breathe Properly

Now you know how to breathe properly:

  • Consciously by placing your awareness on your breath.
  • Quietly by not forcing the air in or out while maintaining proper posture.
  • Deeply by allowing your breathing to sink into your belly.
  • Steadily at a rhythmic pace.
  • Slowly (the inhale and exhale get longer over time).
  • Inhale and exhale from your nose.
  • Allow the air to release on the exhale; never force it.
  • Keep your tongue gently pressed against your palate as you breathe.

Notice any sensations or shifts in your mental functioning during and after conscious breathing. This will reinforce your learning and fuel further practice.

When you want to focus on something important to you, always steady your breath first.

If you’re wrestling with a difficult decision, remind yourself to restore your breath.

When you’re having trouble with a friend, family member, or colleague, tune your breath … again and again.

Bringing your body and mind back into balance doesn’t need to take hours.

You can tune your breath and quiet your mind in a matter of minutes with a little practice.

Read Next

This guide is part of a series:

Part 1: How to Tune Your Breath [You are here]
Part 2: Sitting Meditation Essentials (with 20 Tips)
Part 3: Best Meditation Postures
Part 4: Zhan Zhuang Standing Practice
Part 5: Meditation Tools

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