Can the way you breathe affect your memory?

Most people breathe without giving much thought to technique or strategy. But a study published in the journal Nature Communications might make you think about the way you breathe when you’re trying to learn new ideas. People looking for clues about your mood or stress levels can examine your breathing because it is closely connected to your entire body.

When someone feels anxious or stressed, it’s almost instinctive to tell them to “take a deep breath.” However, exaggerated deep breathing and abdominal breathing can do more harm than good. Fortunately, unlike many other involuntary body functions, breathing is automatic, but also allows for voluntary transformations.

For example, you can adjust your breathing rate and depth and decide whether you breathe through your mouth or nose. Such decisions can result in both physical and cognitive changes, for better or for worse. Many are also unaware that dysfunctional breathing habits are often the result of emotional trauma.

When we’re stressed, our breathing patterns and rate naturally change, but it’s important to be aware of how such triggers change our breathing habits – and what we can do to solve the problem. Now researchers have found that breathing even influences how you remember facts.

The way you breathe can affect your memory

For the study in Nature Communications, the researchers controlled the activation of the brain’s primary inspiratory generator, the PreBötzinger complex (PreBötC), a small group of cells inside the medulla oblongata. Although this is known to be the respiratory control center in the brain, the details of its neurological control are still unclear.

The study used genetically modified mice to examine how breathing might affect the formation of important memories in object recognition and fear conditioning tests. Breathing was controlled using optogenetic manipulation – a method of controlling neuronal activity using light in genetically modified mice.

The researchers triggered respiratory pauses when the mice encoded new information, which impaired recognition of new objects. The pauses in breathing affected areas of the hippocampus, which is important for memory storage. When the researchers forced irregular breathing patterns, memories improved, but when breathing slowed, memory recall worsened.

The same team published a study in 2018 that showed that transitioning from exhalation to inhalation at the beginning or middle of a memory task made people less able to recall information accurately. Next, the researchers used human participants and brain scans to link poor memory performance to deactivation of the brain’s temporal parietal junction, an area responsible for processing information.

The next step was the animal study presented, which led researchers to believe that breathing exercises could be therapeutically helpful beyond reducing stress levels. Neuroscientist Nozomu Nakamura from Hyogo Medical University in Japan, who was part of the research team, commented:

“Respiration is a fundamental life support process in mammals. Although the details of how respiratory function affects brain state remain unclear, recent studies suggest that breathing may play an important role in online brain states.

Determining the detailed role of breathing and molecular mechanisms in the brain is the subject of future research to understand the effects of stress tolerance. The type of breathing manipulation and the use of breathing exercises will be crucial in the treatment and therapy of depression and neuropsychiatric disorders.”

However, the problem with most breathing exercises or techniques is that they do not address the habits that contribute to dysfunctional breathing. Your body knows how to breathe, but can get into trouble if you unconsciously override it with a learned breathing habit that throws your system out of balance.

Overbreathing is a common cause of poor memory and brain fog

It’s no surprise that research shows that the way you breathe affects memory, as cognitive changes such as attention deficits, learning difficulties, memory impairment and brain fog are common symptoms of low CO₂ levels – also known as hypocapnia – caused by overbreathing. But it’s not just the way you breathe that can affect the way you think – the opposite is also true: the way you think can affect the way you breathe.

In my conversation with Dr. Peter Litchfield, a respiratory expert who has a deep understanding of respiratory physiology and its impact on health, explains that CO₂ levels are regulated by automatic reflexes.

There are receptors in your brain and arterial system that respond to the CO₂ concentration and pH of various extracellular fluids such as blood plasma and interstitial fluids (which surround cells). There are receptor sites in the arterial system that respond to oxygen concentration, but surprisingly not in the brain.

This system isn’t designed to go off the rails just because you’re stressed. Unless you have developed bad breathing habits, your breathing will optimize breathing under most circumstances, such as when speaking. However, overbreathing, that is, breathing that results in a CO₂ deficit, can trigger a variety of physical and psychological changes, including:

• Blood loss in the brain
• Loss of oxygen
• Loss of glucose
• Electrolyte changes in the brain that create the conditions for lactic acidosis in the neurons

These brain changes, in turn, lead to disinhibition, where emotions – often anger or fear – are released. This release of emotions can help you cope with a difficult situation or environment. In this way, overbreathing is increased because it serves as your “solution” to a perceived problem. Many then use overbreathing as a coping mechanism.

Quite simply, says Litchfield, you only adopt a habit if it serves you or your physiology in some way. That’s why it’s so important to partner with your body and explore your habits – and how or why you learned them in the first place. Fortunately, such patterns can be reversed by applying breathing behavior analysis learning techniques.

Poor breathing habits are the #1 cause of low CO₂

The main cause of hypocapnia is poor breathing habits in response to habitual triggers, such as stress. For this reason, learning specific breathing techniques is not a long-term solution because they do not address the habit and the habit triggers. To solve the problem, one must understand why breathing becomes dysregulated and how new habits can be learned. In addition to cognitive changes, low CO₂ levels caused by overbreathing can also lead to the following problems:

• Headache
• Nausea and vomiting
• Abdominal symptoms and bloating
• Fatigue
• Muscle pain and weakness, tetany, hyperreflexia, convulsions, tingling in the hands and lips, numbness, tremor and difficulty swallowing
• Cardiovascular changes such as palpitations, tachycardia, cardiac arrhythmias, angina pectoris, ECG abnormalities
• Symptoms affecting consciousness such as: disconnection from the environment, disconnection from people, fainting and hallucinations
• Emotional changes associated with reduction in blood flow to the brain
• Changes in personality and self-esteem

While you can accurately measure your CO₂ levels using something called a capnometer, a good test to determine whether your symptoms are due to a CO₂ deficiency is to breathe into a paper bag. If the symptoms go away, you know that hypocapnia, and therefore overbreathing, is the problem.

Never use a plastic bag as it can cause suffocation. Always use a paper bag that is about 6 by 15 centimeters. If it’s too small or too big, it won’t work. Place the paper bag over your nose and mouth and hold it with your hands as you breathe into it. The CO₂ will build up in the bag, increasing your CO₂ levels as you breathe in.

However, in order to get to the root of the problem, learning breathing behavior analysis techniques are usually required. Litchfield explains:

“We interact with the person through their physiology, and they see what’s going on while they’re behaving the way they do. So we’re exploring this together. And then together we do all sorts of tests depending on who the person is and what the problems are.

A good example would be that we intentionally let them overbreathe. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. You have to do it the right way. There is a right way and a wrong way. We have someone intentionally over-ventilating. And when you do that, symptoms and deficits arise, and they are there, focusing on their experience.

They don’t talk. I’m the one talking. I ask them questions so they can think about the answers, not to interact with me, but just to think about the answers to the questions.

I ask questions like: ‘Are any feelings coming up right now? Are there any memories being triggered right now? Does this remind you of anything in your current life situation? Does this remind you of something that occurred to you in the past?’

And before I do that, I have a lot of information. I have this form. So they’re not just random questions. They are very specific. They relate to the person and their life and what we discovered together. And what often occurs is that they find themselves trapped. They can’t free themselves. They breathe this way and CO₂ levels simply don’t rise no matter what they do. And that’s what is going on in real life when they’re trapped.

When I work with them, I use certain types of experiential paradigms that I employ to help them raise CO₂ levels. The symptoms disappear and they are amazed.”

A simple way to increase your CO₂ levels

While it’s important to become aware of poor breathing habits that can unknowingly sabotage your health, mouth breathing also lowers CO₂ levels and harmfully impacts oxygen utilization at the cellular level. Nasal breathing helps maintain your health, even during exercise.

It may be tempting to breathe through your mouth during physical exertion, but try to avoid this tendency. Limit your effort so that you continue to breathe through your nose most of the time.

This is only temporary as your body adjusts to slightly increased CO₂ levels and you find that you can exert yourself harder and still breathe through your nose. The following steps will help you breathe easier so that your nose hairs barely move.

This type of easy breathing helps you enter and maintain a calm, meditative state while lowering your blood pressure and reducing nasal congestion so you can breathe more easily. You may feel a slight lack of air at first, but this should be tolerable. If it gets uncomfortable, take a 15-second break and then continue.

Place one hand on your upper chest and the other on your stomach. Feel your stomach move in and out slightly with each breath, while your chest remains stationary.

Close your mouth and breathe in and out through your nose. Focus your attention on the cold air entering your nose and the slightly warmer air leaving it as you exhale.

Slowly reduce the volume of each breath until it feels like you are almost not breathing at all (you will notice that your breathing becomes very calm at this point). The key here is that you develop a slight hunger for air. This simply means that there is a slight buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood that signals to your brain that you need to breathe.

After three or four minutes of air hunger, you will feel the positive effects of CO₂ enrichment, such as: an increase in body temperature and an increase in saliva. The former is a sign of improved blood circulation, and the latter is a sign that your parasympathetic nervous system has been activated, which is important for stress relief.

Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola

 

yogaesoteric
April 24, 2024