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“Breathing strongly influences physiology and thought processes, including moods. By simply focusing your attention on your breathing and without doing anything to change it, you can move in the direction of relaxation.” —Andrew Weil, M.D.
I must admit, breathing exercises are not something I knew much about. I’ve never done any kind of meditation or yoga where these types of exercises are a core focus. However, it didn’t take very much research to see that the practice of deep breathing has been shown to have remarkable effects on the mind and the body.
Your brain needs a lot of oxygen to function at its peak, so how you breathe can have a huge impact on both your mental and physical well-being. We can use purposeful breathing as a tool to help put us in a more relaxed state. This benefit drew me to finding out if there were any breathing exercises that specifically aided in sleep.
I spent some time looking for a breathing exercise that was primarily used to promote better sleep. That’s when I found out about the “4-7-8 Breathing Exercise” also called “The Relaxing Breath.” It’s based on pranayama, an ancient Indian practice that means “regulation of breath.”
The exercise is described by Dr. Andrew Weil, a Harvard-trained medical doctor with a focus on holistic health, as “a natural tranquilizer for the nervous system” that eases the body into a state of calmness and relaxation. When you look into the details, you see that it’s a very simple exercise, it takes very little time, and it can be done while lying in bed.
Here’s how it works. Dr. Weil describes the process below in instructions that I’ve taken directly from his website.
Place the tip of your tongue against the ridge of tissue just behind your upper front teeth, and keep it there through the entire exercise. You will be exhaling through your mouth around your tongue; try pursing your lips slightly if this seems awkward.
o Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound.
o Close your mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four.
o Hold your breath for a count of seven.
o Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound to a count of eight.
o This is one breath. Now inhale again and repeat the cycle three more times for a total of four breaths.
Note that you always inhale quietly through your nose and exhale audibly through your mouth. The tip of your tongue stays in position the whole time. Exhalation takes twice as long as inhalation. The absolute time you spend on each phase isn’t important; the ratio of 4:7:8 is important. If you have trouble holding your breath, speed the exercise up but keep to the ratio of 4:7:8 for the three phases. With practice, you can slow it all down and get used to inhaling and exhaling more and more deeply.
I decided to give this a try over a period of nights to see what my results would be. To my surprise, I noticed it helping me to relax. I did it several times, trying to stay focused on my breathing and nothing else.
The one challenge I had was trying to be quiet when exhaling, specifically because I didn’t want to disturb my wife. I adjusted the technique slightly to prevent that by changing the shape and placement of my tongue when I exhaled.
There are some claims that this exercise gets you to sleep in a minute, but I didn’t have those results. I would suggest that you begin practicing with the exercise for seven days and see if you see any noticeable differences in how relaxed your body and mind are as you begin to drift off to sleep.
