The Simplest, Most Effective Breathing Technique for Burnout and Peak Performance
Imagine if your car was breaking down and you could press a button that helped it repair itself? How convenient and reassuring would that be?
Your body has an inbuilt system like this already. All you need to do is activate it.
How Your Breathing Shapes Stress and Performance
Your breathing muscles work both independently and voluntarily. You don’t need to control them when you’re asleep. But you can choose to slow, deepen or simply take a bigger breath during the day. It’s similar to your posture. Your muscles automatically work to keep you seated or standing but you can improve your posture by bringing awareness to it.
Your breathing is automatic too. It’s constantly adapting and responding to what you’re experiencing. You tend to breathe faster when anxious or excited and slower when relaxed. Your breath is highly sophisticated and sensitive. It changes when you exercise, feel an emotion, experience success or failure, perceive a threat, or drink a coffee.
However, your breath is not just influenced by your experiences – it influences them too.
You know this intuitively. You remind yourself to take a deep breath if you’re feeling overwhelmed. You luxuriate in a contended sigh at the end of a long day.
What is less known is that how you breathe has the power to elevate your mood, energy, focus and resilience.
The Optimal Breathing Rate — Six Breaths per Minute
Most people breathe too fast and too shallow – using their chest and shoulders rather than their lower ribs and abdomen. Excessive sitting deconditions our breathing mechanics. Chronic overstimulation keeps our nervous system in high revs.
Research shows that managing your breath so that you’re taking around six cycles a minute has a profound impact on both your physical and cognitive performance.
One study found that practicing six breaths per minute can improve your brain’s ability to spot errors. Slower breathing helps to tune the nervous system from frantic and distracted to cool and composed. Identifying a typo, conflicting data or a colleague’s telltale micro-expression could save you time, money and frustration later on. Just by slowing your breath you could be preventing a cascade of problems later.
How Slow Breathing Supports Burnout Recovery and Focus
Burnout is the result of chronic stress combined with insufficient recovery. The physiological consequences result in over-activation of the fight-or-flight (sympathetic) system – your body’s innate response to challenge. It’s designed to work in short bursts before your complementary recovery system (parasympathetic) rebalances you. Slow breathing activates this recovery system, decreasing heart rate and blood pressure.
Breathing at a slower cadence also regulates the micro-rhythms your heart uses to manage energy. Known as heart rate variability (HRV), this biological constant is used to measure and optimise performance and recovery in elite athletes. It is such a reliable indicator of overall wellbeing that sensors to measure it are now integrated into most smart watches and fitness trackers.
Slow breathing reliably improves HRV and is linked to enhanced decision-making, athletic performance, sleep quality, emotional stability, and composure. It provides the physiological foundations for clear thinking and sustained high performance.
It almost seems too simple. Too easy. But the truth is, regulating your breathing gives you moment to moment access to optimal performance. It’s often the most overlooked tool in a leader’s self-development. And it’s one of the most reliable strategies for overcoming overwhelm.
Try It For Yourself
You can do this with your eyes open or closed. Inhale gently for a count of five, and exhale for a count of five. Continue for at least one minute.
You can also try apps that cue this for you (Breathwrk or The Breathing App)
To get the most out of this technique, ensure you’re in an upright position, as if the crown of your head is being gently pulled towards the ceiling. Breathe with your nose. Feel your belly and lower ribs softly expand and contract as you breathe in and out.
The benefit is immediate. And just like regular fitness training improves everyday function, regular breath training does too. The more you consciously practice optimal breathing, the more automatic it becomes.
You take about 15,000 breaths every day. Each one has the power to manage stress and improve performance.
Upgrade your breath. Upgrade your focus, composure and career.
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