On Breathing: My Journey from Shallow Breathing, Chest Breathing, and Stomach Breathing to Abdominal Breathing

On Breathing: My Journey from Shallow Breathing, Chest Breathing, and Stomach Breathing to Abdominal Breathing

I. Becoming Increasingly Aware of Breathing

As I become quieter within, I become increasingly aware of my breathing. Breathing is actually a major, important action. Like the tranquility of our instinctual being, it is always there, sustaining us, yet overlooked.

It is like being in a quiet house, where you can hear yourself breathe.

When we settle down, we become aware of so many things. The various discomforts in our bodies are the most immediately apparent.

III. Many People Have Been “Stomach Breathing” for Years

1. Habitually holding your breath: In my earlier article, “Unconsciously Holding Your Breath While Concentrating? A Psychoanalytic Case,” the central issue was the somatization of childhood defense mechanisms. Often, while thinking quietly and deeply, I discover that I am holding my breath, breathing with only the tiniest bit of air. This has been a habit for years.
2. Habitually raising your voice to please others: See “Voice and Class: Why Workers Often Speak with a Raised, Tightened Voice Instead of a Voice Supported by the Lower Abdomen.”
3. Habitually breathing shallowly: Prolonged, chronic stress and tension.
4. A hunched upper body and a forward-thrust neck.
5. Stomach discomfort: Prolonged, chronic stress, poor eating habits, and diet.
6. Stomach acid refluxing into the esophagus: An acidic, burning pain below the xiphoid process (heartburn), and pharyngitis (one major cause of pharyngitis is acid reflux into the esophagus).
7. The overall pattern is “stomach breathing.”

What do I mean? Breathing is very shallow, with a tiny breath held just below the xiphoid process—the top of the arch beneath the ribs—around the diaphragm and the cardia, the entrance to the stomach where the esophagus meets it. It does not extend deeply into the lower abdomen, the lower abdominal energy center, as full abdominal breathing does. Then, when speaking, you tighten and raise your voice, lifting your shoulders and constricting your throat, while your stomach area quivers. Sometimes, when you have been mistreated and have to swallow your anger, your stomach hurts even more.

Years of stomach breathing often go unnoticed, but it is clearly unhealthy. In a life spent reading and thinking for long periods, it also creates a greater burden and lowers efficiency.

1. The Benefits of Abdominal Breathing

The benefits of consciously practicing abdominal breathing: gradually changing breathing habits and exercising the diaphragm.

The benefits of abdominal breathing: breathing takes less effort, gas exchange becomes more efficient because the lower lobes of the lungs have the richest blood supply, and it can stimulate the “rest-and-digest” nervous system that governs the internal organs—the parasympathetic nervous system—while massaging the stomach and intestines.

This is why many traditions of practice—yoga, seated meditation, traditional Chinese medicine, tai chi, and meditation—place great importance on it.

1. Why People Lose the Habit of Abdominal Breathing They Had as Infants

a. Changes in posture: The core naturally tightens when standing upright, while prolonged sitting compresses the abdominal cavity.

b. Stress: Chest breathing is the breathing pattern used in stress-defense states such as fight, freeze, or flight, as well as during intense exercise. Prolonged, chronic stress and stress responses can make chest breathing habitual.

c. The fast pace of life and conversation gets people accustomed to rapid, shallow breathing.

d. What is not used deteriorates: The diaphragm weakens, while accessory breathing muscles, such as the sternocleidomastoid and scalene muscles, become excessively tense and compensate, leading to problems such as aching shoulders and neck.

Here we can see the changes that social alienation brings about in our bodies and minds without our awareness.

In writing this piece, I am also, to a large extent, promoting the idea I have always held: everyone has innate wholeness. What, exactly, distances us from that innate wholeness, from being natural and spontaneous? Abdominal breathing is utterly natural and instinctive. It is how we are accustomed to breathing as infants, and our bodies like it. Yet we have lost it, discarded it.

1. Awareness

As the above also shows, in moving from shallow breathing, chest breathing, and “stomach breathing” to abdominal breathing, what matters more is awareness: awareness of our physical condition, such as prolonged sitting and hunching, and our psychological condition, such as persistent tension, stress responses, and accommodating others. Increasing awareness itself is often more important than the exercises themselves.

Move away from tension and deliberate effort, and recover what comes naturally.

Zhuangzi, “The Great Ancestral Teacher”: “The true people of old slept without dreams and woke without worries. They did not seek exquisite flavors in their food, and their breathing was deep. True people breathe from their heels; ordinary people breathe from their throats. Those who are bent under submission speak with constricted throats, as though retching. Those whose cravings run deep have only a shallow wellspring of natural vitality.”

This really is such a precise and vivid description of me and so many ordinary people.

1. Care Rather Than Blame

Many social media accounts about personal growth and exercise peddle anxiety: Look how bad you are—your breathing is shallow, your posture is poor—and how dangerous it all is. The underlying message is how lazy and useless you are, and that you had better hurry up and follow them to change yourself. (Even typing this paragraph, I felt my stomach tighten a little and my breathing grow shallower.)

The psychology of the Marx-Zhuangzi framework focuses more on offering ordinary people insight and care, and reducing self-blame. Learn to relax more, to stop striving, and to love yourself.

As people mature, they become aware of many things. They come to feel that life is unfair at every turn and that there is no basis for comparing one person with another. So all that elitist peddling of striving really is meaningless. Who will be the first to awaken from the great dream?