“B reath has been ignored by the general public,” Dr Belisa Vranich says.

Still sitting comfortably? You can breathe normally now. Since you do it around 16 times a minute, 960 times an hour and 23,040 times a day, there’s an awful lot of room for improvement. A whole self-care industry has made us doubt everything we do naturally – eat, exercise, sleep – and breathing is at the heart of it all. Breathing: once you start noticing it, everyone’s doing it.Īnd, in some ways, it’s inevitable. “Breathfulness” is touted as the new mindfulness (though one attendee of a recent session in London described it as “yoga without the yoga”). Now breathing classes and retreats have reached Britain, too: the Transformational Breath Foundation UK lists events all over the country, promising that “you’ll access the full potential of your breathing system”. Even Hillary Clinton claimed, in her book What Happened, that yogic alternate-nostril breathing was what helped her get over losing the presidential election to Donald Trump: “Breathing deeply from your diaphragm, place your right thumb on your right nostril and your ring and little fingers on your left…” and so on. Hardcore gym types talked excitedly about breathing as a “remote control for the brain”. New friends told me about conscious breathwork circles and breathing re-education classes. One of the first people I met, an English film producer, had just had the word “BREATHE” tattooed on her wrist. I first started noticing how fashionable breathing had become when I moved to Los Angeles in 2016. While Hof may be the most eccentric person to tout breath as a panacea for the 21st century, he is not alone.

They stay in their brains thinking, ‘This cannot be so simple.’ But it is!” He claims that by performing this exercise daily (along with a regimen of cold showers and meditation), we can help treat a whole suite of conditions and diseases, from depression to arthritis. The person who formulated this exercise, Dutch endurance specialist and multiple world record holder Wim Hof, 59, has trained himself to go up to six or seven minutes. You might be surprised how long you can push it before you have to take a huge gasp.Īfter three attempts, I managed three minutes 23 seconds of not breathing. (As long as you’re not doing this in a swimming pool.) That slight feeling of panic? It’s nothing to worry about. Now take a big breath, then expel all the air from your lungs and hold it. Feeling a little floaty? Fingers tingling? Don’t worry. Activate your diaphragm, pull the air right down into your belly, let the chest fall. A re you sitting comfortably? Airways clear, back straight, no respiratory conditions? OK.

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