As a sports therapist and reflexologist, I spend a great deal of time massaging sore muscles, fixing torn tendons and ligaments, bringing down anxiety levels, and getting people moving again. Oh, and sometimes saving their relationships. Really?

Well, as part of my holistic therapy practice, one of my best kept secrets is teaching people how to breathe properly. We breathe roughly 20,000 times a day, so we’ve had plenty of practice. We know that proper breathing helps our nervous, muscular, digestive, lymphatic, cardiovascular and immune systems to function optimally. So how exactly are we getting it wrong? If you’re doing one or more of these things it’s time to change:

Chest breathing (exclusively) - reducing the capacity of our lungs, often as a result of rounded shoulders and compression in chest caused by a prolonged hunched over posture.

Teeth grinding (Bruxism) – usually caused by breathing through the mouth, creating headaches, stiff jaws, neck and shoulders.

Snoring / sleep apnoea – again, mouth breathing resulting in fatigue, difficulty concentrating, sore throat and marital disharmony!

Breath holding – increases the anxiety response and tightens the upper chest and diaphragm.

We weren’t born breathing shallowly using our neck and shoulders as our main inhalation muscles. If we look at a baby’s breathing we notice its belly both rising and expanding outwards like an accordion with each in - breath, then falling down and inwards with the exhale. The breath is broad, it is soft and rhythmical and measured and nurturing. It is mainly nasal. Inhale to nourish, exhale to pacify down.

So, what happens to us as we age, why do we suddenly start wearing our shoulders as earrings, our diaphragm as rigid as a three-week-dead hamster, our breath as shallow as a Love Islander’s intellect?

School. Society. Stress. Our perfect children are forced to sit on hard chairs in an attitude of concentration for sometimes hour upon hour, compromising posture, contracting chest muscles, and limiting lung capacity. In this rounded state the mouth opens to invite more oxygen into the body and stays open. This attitude of half breathing becomes the default pattern, which the body interprets as a danger signal, stimulating our fight, flight or freeze response.

When as adults we end up suffering from chronic anxiety, migraines, fatigue, depression, asthma, even auto-immune diseases we should seek medical assistance but also look at how we breathe. Is this serving me well? If not, what can I do to improve it?

In a nutshell, breathe through the nose. That’s what it’s there for. When we do this simple thing our heart rate slows, our blood pressure lowers, and our stress response is dampened. Nitric oxide is produced in the nose which, when inhaled into the lungs, significantly enhances our capacity to absorb oxygen, especially when we exercise.

It’s never too late to change. We can and we do reset our movement and breathing patterns well into later life. We practise yogic pranayama breath work in the gym – I’m no Tibetan monk, but my classes often try Nadhi Sodhana, or single nostril work during our meditation practice and report lasting ease and peaceful breathing. Another approach is to deploy the power of breathing into deliberately provoking a stress response in order to power down more fully afterwards. Wim Hof has made headlines using the ‘inner fire’ method (a practice called Tummo breathing which predates him by roughly a few thousand years) to transformational effect and describes living without this practice as like driving through life ‘with the brakes on’.

The most oxygen, the most energy, and optimum health for the least effort. Oh, and a happier sleeping partner no longer sharing a bed with an overwrought jackhammer. Win, win. Wouldn’t you want this as part of your mental and physical health toolbox?