How Do Breathing Exercises Prevent Sickness?

I remember, as a kid, hating when I would get sick. I would be absolutely miserable if I got ill. A cold or flu would be so agonizing to me that I literally feared catching those maladies. Probably the only reason why I wasn't a complete germaphobe, trying to kill every pathogen on every surface, was that I learned that germs are everywhere. 

    I learned that no matter how hard you try, you'll never kill them all and they'll still be right there on all the surfaces you have to touch. Our only recourse is to keep those surfaces clean to minimize the number of pathogens that we're introducing to our bodies. But, trying to wipe out all of the germs is futile.

    Therefore, it seemed to me that we were doomed to get sicknesses on a regular basis throughout the year. I heard there was no cure for the common cold because there are too many strains of the cold; no vaccine could help us. So, I hoped that one day, some scientist somewhere would come up with a breakthrough so nobody would have to feel the misery of an illness ever again, or the pain of being forced to go back to school before you've even recovered from your symptoms.

    But that wish reminds me of a very popular verse from the Bible:

    "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."

    

    - Mark 11:24 (Biblehub)

    The reason why my naive childhood hopes reminded me of Mark 11:24 is that I eventually found out that we've had some very reliable and very accessible ways of preventing ourselves from catching a seasonal bug since thousands of years before I was even born. It's something so constant and so pervasive that we use it all the time without even thinking about it. In fact, we can't live without this immunity solution.

    That secret and powerful medicine that we all carry with us in infinite quantities is also something that costs us not even a single penny. This secret medicine is called breathing. You might be thinking, "If breathing is the secret to immunity, then why do we all get sick when we all breath all the time?"

    My answer to that question is that just because you're swinging a hammer doesn't mean you're building a house. If you breathe in specific ways and perform pranayama (breathing exercises) then each different method of breathing can have an entirely different medicinal effect on your body.

Breathing exercises can help to prevent illness by preventing adverse reactions, changing blood pH, and producing nitric oxide (a natural germ killer) in the respiratory system.

How Diaphragmatic Breathing Can Prevent Illness

Photo by Eli DeFaria on Unsplash

In Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee wrote the following quote:

    “Let yourself go with the disease, be with it, keep company with it—        this is the way to be rid of it.”

    I guess the only way to be sure what exactly he meant by that would be to ask him. Of course, I never had the opportunity to ask Bruce Lee what that quote meant. The beauty of this ambiguity is that it's open to the reader's interpretation. I believe Lee was specifically referring to mental distractions. Fascinatingly, it accurately applies to actual diseases.

    As counterintuitive as it may seem, sometimes the best way to fight an illness is to not fight it, or fight it less aggressively. Breathing can accomplish exactly that.

    In at least one study, some participants were injected with escherichia coli (e coli) endotoxin. The control group came down with all the expected symptoms: fever, chills, nausea, ... etc. 

    The other group was a group that performed deep breathing exercises immediately after being injected. This pranayama was a type of controlled hyperventilation utilizing deep breathing, including diaphragmatic breathing. The "breathing exercise" group's participants had very mild or no reaction at all to the e. coli endotoxin.

    How does something as simple as rapid, diaphragmatic breathing prevent people from getting sick from a direct injection of an endotoxin into their bloodstream? According to the study, this breathwork causes the body to increase the production of epinephrine (adrenaline). The reason this increase in fight-or-flight hormone reduces the severity of immune responses is that our nervous system has two sides to it: sympathetic and parasympathetic. Sympathetic dominance is when your body is in fight-or-flight mode, when you have adrenaline pumping through you and you're dealing with an immediate threat to your health. Parasympathetic dominance is also known as rest-and-digest; it can also be expanded to rest, digest, and breed mode.

The Relationship Between Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Dominance

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

    When you're in sympathetic dominance, the functions of parasympathetic dominance can not occur as powerfully. The same is true the other way around. Since one function of parasympathetic dominance is actually your immune responses, when you get a kick of adrenaline it dampens the severity of your symptoms. You might even be asymptomatic of a cold or whatever illness you come down with as a result of experiencing brief, therapeutically done periods of fight-or-flight mode.

    So, in this way, you're preventing yourself from catching a disease by not fighting the disease. Yet, at the same time, you are fighting it quite efficiently. The same type of pranayama technique not only reduces your general immune response (the painful, symptomatic immune response), it also strengthens your specific immune response. This happens, according to another peer-reviewed study, as a result of cortisol being reduced and immunoglobulin G (IgG) being increased.

Pranayama and Specific Immunity

Picture by CDC

    IgG is an antibody that seeks out foreign threats to the body and helps the immune system attack specific pathogens. This way of fighting germs is asymptomatic. It occurs during the specific immune response. Since the specific immune response is asymptomatic, for all intents and purposes you're not sick.

    Other things to consider in regard to how deep breathing affects the immune system are immunoglobulin E (IgE), the autoimmune system, and cytokines. One study has found that there is a relationship between cortisol levels and IgE. The relationship is that when cortisol increases, so does IgE. What that means for you is that when you get stressed out you can expect worse allergy symptoms and worse autoimmune attacks than when you're in a state of relaxation.

    Since the other study I cited reads that diaphragmatic breathing reduces cortisol while increasing IgG, we can infer that diaphragmatic breathing reduces IgE, thus reducing autoimmune symptoms. Concisely put: 

    Deep breathing exercises have the potential to prevent you from getting sick from pathogens and also reduce the harshness of autoimmune symptoms and allergic reactions.

How Breathing Exercises Can Make You More Alkaline

Photo by Alex Kondratiev on Unsplash

    Anyone who even slightly cares about holistic wellness has probably seen a few news stories and advertisements talking about foods or supplements we could consume to make our blood more alkaline. You've probably stumbled upon YouTube videos or heard advice on talk shows about how we can change our diets or drink high-pH water to become more alkaline. It's no secret that people who care about holistic wellness seem to always be striving to raise the pH of their blood.

    After all, it's a proven fact that a basic pH (as opposed to an acidic pH) is a very unfriendly environment for some viruses and bacteria. Using bases against germs is an effective way to kill those pathogens. Even surgeons are coming up with ways to coat the surfaces of surgical implants with alkaline substances in an effort to kill the germs that might cause an infection post-surgery. So, surely eating a more alkaline diet and drinking alkaline water can prevent you from getting sick, right?

    Unfortunately, and correct me if I'm wrong, the idea that an alkaline diet can raise your body's pH simply because you're consuming high-pH foods has been legitimately, scientifically debunked. Therefore, don't expect to be protected from a cold by eating a diet loaded with high-pH foods. Although, hope is not lost. There is a way to make your blood more alkaline, and the best part is: it doesn't cost you a dime. That method of increasing your blood pH is, of course, breathing exercises.

    Breathing exercises can improve your blood pH by shifting the proportion of how much carbon dioxide and oxygen you have in your blood. Let's explore in more detail how this works. 

    Though carbon dioxide (CO2) and oxygen (O2) don't have a pH all by themselves, the solution in which they're contained has a pH based on their presence. When considering our blood, the amount of carbon dioxide compared to oxygen pretty much dictates how alkaline our blood is. CO2 is more acidic than O2. Because of this, the right type of pranayama exercise can actually raise the pH of a person's blood.

    Blood is made more alkaline by deep breathing exercises because with each breath you take, you're getting rid of CO2 and adding more O2. So, you're getting rid of a chemical of an acidic pH and introducing more of a chemical of a basic pH. This shift in pH is also why people begin to feel light-headed and maybe even feel tingling in their fingertips when they do thorough breathwork. And, since we know that germs don't do well in alkaline conditions, we know that certain yogic breathing exercises can help to fight off illnesses.

How Pranayama Can Kill Germs

So far, in this article and in my post titled "3 Secrets to Immunity," I've mentioned how we can prevent our non-specific immune response from causing us the discomforts that we all hate to experience when we get ill. I have also mentioned how the change in pH also fights pathogens. But, there is still at least one more way that yogic breathing can inactivate viruses and kill bacteria, nitric oxide (NO).

    Nitric oxide is different from nitrous oxide (N2O). NO is not laughing gas. It is, however, a pathogen-killing agent that is naturally produced in our bodies. According to an article found on PubMed, NO kills germs by binding covalently to DNA, lipids, and proteins. And, in some research, it has been found that by doing a specific type of pranayama, nasal nitric oxide increased 15 times. Intriguingly, one way of breathing can have this effect and another can't. 

    In the same research that discovered that breathwork could multiply nasal nitric oxide, they compared humming breathwork to silent breathwork. It was humming breathing exercises that multiplied nasal nitric oxide 15 times more than that of silent yogic breathing. So, we know that nitric oxide kills germs. We also know that performing bhramari pranayama (humming bee breath pranayama) produces 1500% more nasal NO than silent breaths. But, is all this theory of any practical significance when it comes to immune support?

    That's the question that one research paper set out to answer. What this research found was that producing NO in the nasal cavities and sinuses legitimately helps to cure the flu by killing off the influenza virus. It's exciting to know that it's not just theory based on the idea that NO kills viruses and we produce NO in our upper respiratory system when we hum; it's a concept that actually works in practice. Bhramari pranayama kills viruses in the upper respiratory tract by amplifying nasal nitric oxide 15-fold.

    This discovery is pertinent even when considering illnesses of the lower respiratory tract, like COVID-19, due to the fact that many lower-respiratory-tract infections start off in the sinuses. Since the sinuses are where many respiratory infections begin, bhramari pranayama is very good for preventing infections since this technique produces germ-killing nitric oxide right where the infections begin: the sinuses and nasal passages. In other words, doing humming breathing exercises stops upper-respiratory infections before they have a chance to gain strength.

How to Do Bhramari Pranayama

Video by Ventuno Yoga

The significant thing in doing the "bee breath" exercises, also called the "humming bee breath", is that you hum. A basic explanation of it is that you simply take deep breaths and hum on the exhales. Some yogis advocate that you press on the tragus of the ear with your index finger or thumb and then hum. Other instructors create a "mask" (shanmukhi mudra) over their faces with their fingers while pressing the tragus of each ear with their thumbs. In the first photo of this section on how pranayama can kill germs, shanmukhi mudra is being used to complement bhramari pranayama. My hand placement is not exactly textbook in this mudra. I'll explain how this form is done in more detail.

    How to do Shanmukhi Mudra

Since the point of shanmukhi mudra is sensory isolation, you may get the desired effect by simply pressing your tragus against your ear with the finger or thumb of each hand. But, if you want a more "proper" way of doing shanmukhi mudra with possibly better results, you can also close your eyes and cover your eyelids with your middle finger. In the picture above, where I'm attempting shanmukhi mudra, you might say that my mudra isn't quite right. But, it serves the purpose.

    Shanmukhi Mudra:

• Sit tall.
• Close your eyes and look into the 3rd eye (the center of your forehead between your eyes.
• Put your index fingers across your forehead over your eyebrows.
• Place your middle fingers gently over your eyelids.
• Rest your ring fingers next to the broadest part of your nose.
• I put my pinky fingers beneath my lips, but that's just my own thing. The pinky finger position is whatever is comfortable for you.

This video by Sikana English not only explains the important points of Shanmukhi Mudra, but it also demonstrates how to do the humming bee breath.

    With this exercise, you can focus your mind while at the same time receiving the immune support of amplifying your nasal nitric oxide by 15 times.

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