INTRODUCTION

Good Psychology needs to be grounded in good Biology. Shallow chest breathing is the body’s response to stress, and in turn, chest breathing keeps the body stuck in a kind of panic, which manifests as chronic anger, anxiety and/or depression. This vicious cycle needs to be broken.

Restoring natural, healthy – diaphragmatic – breathing is the pre-requisite for successful therapy, including releasing stuck emotions, as well as enabling the brain to accept more resourceful and positive thinking patterns.

Psychology = from “psycho-” and “-ology”.
psycho = greek: psyche – breath, spirit, soul, mind
ology = the study of something

“You simply watch. Remember, simply watch. This is what Buddha has called VIPASSANA – the watching of the breath, awareness of the breath – or SATIPATTHANA – remembering, being alert of the life energy that moves in breath. Don’t try to take deep breaths, don’t try to inhale or exhale, don’t do anything. You simply relax and let the breathing be natural – going on its own, coming on its own – and many things will become available to you.” (Osho)

PRANAYAMA in Yoga is the art of breathing control: “When the breath wanders the mind also is unsteady. But when the breath is calmed the mind too will be still, and the yogi achieves long life. Therefore, one should learn to control the breath.“ (Hatha Yoga Pradipika)

WHY CONTROL BREATHING?

We need to pay special attention to the breath, firstly because it is the respiratory system is the the only major system in the body which is usually involuntary, but which can also be voluntarily controlled.

We need to pay special attention to the breath secondly because it is a very powerful and centrally important system. Somewhat like the flywheel in a car engine, the breath regulates all the other autonomic systems, including brain function.

As yogis have known for centuries, controlling and changing the way we breathe, can go a long way towards getting us unstuck from the physically and psychologically debilitating effects of sympathetic over-activation, that is: stress.
To restore the balance in the ANS (Autonomic Nervous System), we need to change the chronic habit of subtle or more obvious hyperventilation (rapid chest breathing) to slow diaphragmatic (belly) breathing, which is natural in normal, happy people, and all animals. If you don’t believe me, take a look at a happy baby, or your dog.

OXYGEN AND CARBON DIOXIDE

Photosynthesis is the chemical process in green plants that traps the sun’s energy – photons – and uses them to manufacture convenient energy-storage molecules such as sugars and starch. The process uses carbon dioxide (CO2) and releases oxygen (O2) into the atmosphere as a by-product. Metabolism is the neatly symmetrical chemical process in animal cells. It is the slow burning that releases the sun’s energy trapped in the fuels manufactured by plants, for use by animals. Just like any other fire, or your car’s engine, the process requires oxygen, and releases carbon dioxide as a by-product, which is then utilized by plants to perform photosynthesis… and this is the cycle of life on planet Earth.

THE EVOLUTION OF UNNATURAL BREATHING IN HUMANS

Somatic Experiencing® was developed by Dr. Peter Levine following his observation that animals in the wild do not get traumatized even though daily they are faced with life threatening situations. Dr. Levine observed the mechanisms by which animals are able to shake off the high levels of nervous system arousal and return to their daily lives. He then asked the question of why humans are so susceptible to the devastating effects of trauma.

What he realized is that as the neocortex evolved, that part of the brain that makes us the most human, giving us the ability to think and ponder deep philosophical questions, our ability to override our instinctual responses also came online.

Now, in most cases this is a really good thing. We don’t have to automatically lash out and kill someone just because they took our food. We can creatively think up better strategies to deal with threats.

But, as with most things in nature, being given a new and enhanced capability usually involves losing some part of an old one in its place. In this case the ability to override the instinctual responses of the nervous system left us with a vulnerability to being traumatized.

First, let’s look at some of the underlying theory on which SE® is built. We start with the Polyvagal Theory of Dr. Stephen Porges at the University of Illinois. Physiologists and medical schools are still teaching (not quite correctly) that the ANS exists in two states (or phases): fight or flight (sympathetic) and rest and recuperation (parasympathetic).

Dr. Porges observed that we actually have three states in the ANS which form a heirarchy. He calls these states:
‘Social Engagement’ which is parasympathetic, ‘Fight or Flight’ which is sympathetic, and ‘Freeze’ which is parasympathetic and sympathetic activation simultaneously. In the human nervous system we still have freeze / dissociation as an algorithm that can be run to protect us. But, in humans it is a bit more complicated. In most cases we can at least partially override freeze. Most people have never fully fainted in fear. But, most of us have temporarily been unable to move, or have spaced out, or went speechless in fear.

We have several synonyms for freeze, including dissociation, immobility, spacing out, deer in the headlights look. In the healthy nervous system it still serves and protects us humans, but often freeze is associated with the residual crippling effects of trauma. Here’s what happens that causes humans to get stuck in trauma.

When we are faced with a life-threatening crisis our nervous system develops a motor plan for escaping it. Usually that motor plan begins to be executed, for example running, or lashing out. But, when that plan is thwarted by being caught in a dead end situation, we go into freeze. Please note that “life-threatening” doesn’t only refer to our physical survival, but also to our emotional survival.

This means that humans are equally traumatized by rejection, abandonment, betrayal, and humiliation, that is the experience of being disconnected from others, the world, and self. Even though we cannot escape, our protective motor plan continues to go around in our brain. In animals when they come out of freeze the energy is drained off by running to escape or by the rhythmic waves of muscle contractions. This doesn’t happen in humans every time, or we override the trembling that would help accomplish this.

So, we are left highly activated with an incomplete motor plan still going round and round in our brain. This motor plan wants to complete and so our unconscious mind may continually place us in situations similar to this one so that we can use the motor plan to complete the movement back to safety.

These incomplete motor plans continue to run long after the original event. They waste mental energy and they continually activate the nervous system towards fight or flight or even push it into freeze with the right kind of threat. Many people are always hyper, or hypervigilant. They look like they have had too much coffee. Those are people who have gotten stuck in the sympathetic system activation of fight or flight.

Being stuck is like when your computer slows to a crawl when some error causes a program to get stuck in a continuous loop, eating up CPU cycles. You sit there waiting and waiting for the task at hand to complete.

When the brain is stuck with several of these protective motor plans running all the time because they can’t complete, our brains run slow and inefficiently, just as our computer does. Being frozen in fight / flight affects every single cell, organ, and system of the body that is controlled by the ANS (Autonomic Nervous System).

Article by: DR SUSAN KRIEGLER