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What Your Breathing Says About Your Mental Health
“Breath fingerprints” are a new avenue to understanding the brain
You don’t need to think about it until you think about it. Breathing. The most fundamental physical function. The most basic act that our bodies undertake to keep our brains alive, exchanging cardon dioxide for oxygen, nourishing every cell inside us.
The reason you don’t need to think about breathing is because of this area of the brainstem called the pre-Bötzinger complex. It’s a group of cells that acts as a pacemaker clicking off about 12 times a minute, triggering your body, without conscious thought at all, to breathe.
Of course, you know it’s more complicated than that. You can hold your breath after all — you are in control of the process. And it’s more complicated than that. Higher levels of your brain feed into the pre-Bötzinger complex to increase your breathing rate when your body is moving, or when energy expenditure goes up.
And it’s more complicated even that that. You may never have noticed, but when you are breathing through your nose, you’re mostly breathing through one nostril at a time…
