Six reasons to breathe through your nose- reduce asthma, bronchitis, improve memory, lower pain,blood pressure and stress.

Unless zooming up a hill, arms and legs flying like billy-o, it is always good to breathe through the nose and here are six reasons why.

1. First, the friction of air on the nasal passages and sinuses opens them up. This is called vasodilation. This spreads throughout our bodily systems and lowers blood pressure overall.
2. When we breathe through the nose, our sinuses produce an appropriate amount of nitric oxide in their tissues.  Nitric Oxide relaxes and dilates the arteries – vasodilation again – and so lowers blood pressure.  Of course, we can drink beetroot juice, which is now known to raise nitric oxide, but if blood pressure is a problem, the best natural way to lower it is to nasal breathe and then maybe add a glass of beetroot juice – but at least nasal breathing is free and not at all sugary!
3. Breathing through the nose lowers stress, and stress is possibly the most notorious cause of high blood pressure – plus a multitude of other nasties.To help understand why nasal breathing lowers stress, it is easier to look at what happens when mouth breathing. Mouth breathing leads to hyperventilation. For good health and happiness, the ideal number of tiny, effortless breaths is actually 10 – 14 per minute. This is lower than the number usually given – which is 10 – 20 per minute; that higher number will be based on the general population with its wide range of healthiness. When the number of breaths rises above c.14, the brain interprets the signal as stress: even the fittest athlete cannot charge up a hill without the breathing rate rising above 14 -and probably resorting to mouth breathing. As we learn to close the mouth and allow the tongue to rest in the soft palate within our teeth, the breathing rate slows. This means, to the brain, we are less stressed and therefore our blood pressure drops. Ta dah!
4. Continuing on using the nose to adjust stress appropriately, they have discovered what the yogis have known for years: breathing in through the left nostril is calming and through the right it’s stimulating. Which means that to aid digestion and cope with long term pain or stress, spend a little time only breathing through the left nostril. If you feel a bit sleepy and need to wake up or you hurt yourself – tripping over whilst rushing up that hill and banging your knee – then breathing in through the right nostril will raise the stress response, which triggers the body to produce its natural pain killers – two types: the opioids and the cannabinoids – yes, we all have an inner weed system. Fantastic.
5. Nasal breathing maintains a good level of surfactant in the lungs.  Surfactant is good stuff!  It makes things slippery, in this case the tissues of the lungs.  As we breathe out, the end points of the airways, the alveoli, contract. Easy expansion follows if we have good levels of surfactant.  As said above, mouth breathing leads to hyperventilation; as breathing rates rise and get heavier, surfactant levels drop, making breathing harder work than it should be, which leads to a vicious circle of lower surfactant levels making breathing harder so driving the desire to mouth breathe which further lowers those surfactant levels. Another good thing about surfactant is that is contains natural immune cells that bind to pathogens – viruses and bad bacteria – and transports them out of the lungs.  All of which means that mouth breathing increases asthma, coughing and the chances of catching bronchitis or pneumonia.
6. The final reason: breathing in through the nose helps us remember stuff.  Recent discoveries have us think this is because of the pathways involved.  The first is to the olfactory centre of the brain, and the other two are to the hippocampus, part of the memory system, and the amygdala, the fear centre of the brain. When we get scared by something, we take a sharp in breath and the link to the hippocampus and the amygdala makes the brain remember the event and seek to avoid the danger in the future.  It’s also worth noting that this is the pathway that is triggered when we smell a smell and are transported back in time, triggering old memories; an odd sensation.  Therefore if you need to remember something and for some reason have no way of making a note, try taking a sharp nasal inhale to help stick it in the memory, then rush along, arms and legs flying like billy-o, to reach the note making place…..