Want to Feel Better? Just Breathe – The Power of Bhramari Pranayama (Humming Bee’s Breath)

Want to learn a simple trick to feel better? Just breathe. But not just any type of breathing. Learn how the yogic practice of Bhramari Pranayama (Humming Bee’s Breath) can help shift your nervous system into parasympathetic functioning, the Rest and Digest part of our nervous system’s balancing program.

One little known fact about yogic breathing techniques concerns their profound effects on the autonomic nervous system. Extending or lengthening the exhalation is a powerful way to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system, the Rest and Digest part of our nervous system’s balancing program. In fact, our breath patterns affect the nervous system in both ways – to either balance and quiet the system or excite it. It’s worhwhile to understand how this actually happens.

How Does Your Breath Affect Your Nervous System?

The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) that connects brain to body is a two-way street. If I am anxious and nervous or stressed out by events in my life or simply the thoughts about those events, my brain, via the nerves of the ANS, will likely turn on the Sympathetic part of that system (the Fight or Flight response), which could result in faster heart and breathing rates, and increases in blood pressure, to mention just two of the most obvious physiological changes.

But the cool thing is that the lungs and heart can feed back to the brain and essentially convince the brain that things are calm and peaceful, even when there are still stressful circumstances. One neat way this happens involves the relationship of the heart and lungs and the nerves between them.

In each round of breath, during your inhalation, your heart gets stimulated to beat a little faster. Then during the exhalation that follows, your heart gets told to slow down a tad. The overall effect is very little change in the heart rate from minute to minute.

How NOT To Deepen Your Breath

When you make one part of the breath cycle, either the inhale or the exhale, longer than the other, and you do this for several minutes, the accumulated effect is that you will either slow the heart rate down or speed it up from where you started.

The standard instruction to get people to breath more deeply to induce relaxation is “to take a deep breath.” However, when you make the inhales longer than the exhales, for example, by using a two-second inhale and a one-second exhale, and you keep this up for several minutes, it will have the opposite effect of what you are trying to accomplish.

The heart rate will go a bit faster. This will send a feedback message to the brain that things need to activate more in the brain and body for whatever work there is to be done, stimulating the Sympathetic portion of the ANS.

Enter Bhramari Pranayama (Humming Bee’s Breath) – A Simple Technique for Greater Calm and Well-being

With the very useful Bhramari breath (Bee’s Breath), we do the opposite. As we hum during the exhalation, the exhales get longer relative to the inhales, as when we do a 1:2 ratio breath practice without the humming.

This new respiratory cycle begins to slow down the heart rate, sending a message to the brain that everything is more peaceful and calm than five minutes ago, allowing the brain to support this shift further by activating the Parasympathetic portion of the ANS (the Rest and Digest or Relaxation response) that goes back from brain to body.

Research has shown that the vagus nerve as well as certain chemical neurotransmitters account for these effects of breath patterns on heart rate and subsequently on shifting the balance between the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic parts of the ANS. Keep in mind that the ANS is trying to keep all background systems in balance and responding appropriately to ever-changing circumstances of our day.

In short, our conscious choice of breathing differently can shift us to a more desirable part of the ANS, either by stimulating the active Sympathetic branch or the quieting Parasympathetic branch.  Most of us need more of the latter, but not always!

How to Practice Bhramari Pranayama

What to try it for yourself? Here’s a simple way to get started.

• Sit comfortably in a quiet place with your spine straight and shoulders relaxed. You can sit cross-legged on the floor or in a chair with your feet flat on the ground and your eyes closed
• Place your index fingers on the cartilage between your cheeks and ears, just above your earlobes.
• Breathe in through your nose, filling your lungs as much as is comfortable.
• As you exhale, keep your mouth closed and make a humming sound, similar to the buzzing of a bee. The sound should be steady, smooth, and continuous throughout the entire exhalation.
• Focus on the vibrations created by the humming, particularly in your head and face.

Repeat this process for 6-8 rounds.

Originally Published on Yoga for Healthy Aging