What Your Breath Is Telling You About Your Nervous System
Most of us don’t think much about breathing. It’s been happening since we were born — automatic, invisible, taken for granted.
But breathing is one of the few autonomic functions we can consciously influence. And for anxiety management, that makes it unusually useful. In a survey of several hundred patients who had completed a mindfulness-based stress reduction program, Jon Kabat-Zinn found that the majority rated the breathing practices as the single most important thing they had learned.
That’s a striking finding. Not the cognitive techniques. Not the mindfulness exercises. The breath.
A simple experiment
Before reading further, try this.
Sit up straight or stand. Place one hand on your upper chest and one hand on your stomach. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, three times.
Notice which hand moves more.
If the hand on your stomach moves more, you’re likely doing what’s called diaphragmatic or belly breathing. If the hand on your chest moves more, you’re probably shallow breathing — using the upper chest rather than the full capacity of your lungs.
Now try to shift it. If your chest hand was moving, see if you can get your stomach hand to move instead. Notice what that feels like — whether it’s easy, uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or a bit of all three.
What the two types of breathing actually do
Neither way of breathing is wrong. They serve different functions — and the body uses them accordingly.
Belly breathing — deeper, slower, engaging the diaphragm — activates the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system associated with rest, digestion, and recovery. When you breathe this way, you’re sending the body a signal: it’s safe. You can relax.
Chest breathing — shallower, faster, higher in the body — activates the sympathetic nervous system. This is the part associated with alertness, readiness, and the fight/flight/freeze response. It’s useful when you genuinely need to mobilise — when there’s something that requires quick action. The problem is that many people with anxiety spend most of their time in this mode even when there’s no actual threat present.
The breath, in other words, isn’t just a response to your nervous system state. It’s also a way of influencing it.
Why breathing can initially increase anxiety
This is worth naming because it catches a lot of people off guard.
For many people with high anxiety, focusing on their breath doesn’t immediately create calm — it creates more anxiety. The unfamiliarity of it. The sense of trying to control something that usually runs on autopilot. The physical sensation of breathing differently than usual.
If that’s your experience, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It usually means the nervous system has been in a particular pattern for a long time and is resisting the change. That resistance tends to ease with practice — but it’s worth knowing it might show up first.
How to start slowly
If you’re new to working with your breath, the most useful thing is to keep the starting point very small.
Try three to five belly breaths — like the experiment above — once or twice a day. That’s it. Not a twenty-minute practice. Not a complete overhaul of how you breathe. Just a few deliberate breaths, consistently, over time.
Breathing patterns are shaped by the muscles and nervous system over years. They change gradually, not overnight. Small and consistent tends to work better than intensive and sporadic.
If you find it genuinely difficult to approach on your own — or if working with your breath seems to consistently increase rather than decrease anxiety — it’s worth getting some support. A yoga teacher, a meditation instructor, or an anxiety counsellor can help you work with this in a way that feels safer and more manageable.
The Breathe2Relax app — available free on iOS and Android — is also a useful tool if you’d like a guided starting point. It walks you through diaphragmatic breathing with both visual and audio guidance.
What this has to do with anxiety more broadly
The breath is a useful entry point into working with anxiety not just because of its direct physiological effects — though those are real — but because it’s a way of practising something more fundamental: turning toward your body’s experience rather than away from it.
Anxiety often involves a disconnection from the body — a kind of living in the head, in the thoughts, in the anticipation of what might go wrong. Breath practice, even in small doses, is a way of coming back. Of noticing what’s actually happening in the body right now rather than what the mind is projecting forward.
That shift — from head to body, from future to present — is at the core of most effective anxiety work.
If anxiety is something you’re actively working with, anxiety counselling is available in Squamish and online across BC. You might also find the free Name It to Tame It anxiety course a useful complement — it covers some of the same ground around identifying and working with emotional and physical experience.
