The breathing pattern when a person is at quiet rest is usually below 16 breaths per minute with the average person having a tidal volume of 600 milliliters. The medulla and pons have the responsibility for keeping the breath going.
It is commonly known that emotional experience changes a person’s breathing pattern. Breath cycles vary with emotional state. Anger is marked by deep and shallow breathing, depression is known by its sighs for lack of oxygen, while hyperventilation occurs in anxiety and phobia (Bass & Gardner, 1985).
It is also known that the primary way of suppressing emotions is by restricting the breath. Release the breath and release the emotion goes the clinical formula. Another common principle regarding emotion and breathing comes from the practice of yogic pranayama which seeks to induce a relaxed state by slow, controlled breathing. Studies of yogic breathing going back to the 1980s found that the opposite—rapid, continuous breathing—can cause hyperventilation and altered states of consciousness as in Holotropic Breathwork is also well known. It has also been empirically confirmed that intentionally altering a breathing pattern can change one’s emotional state (Philippot, Chapelle, & Blairy, 2010). This is one reason why the use of breathwork modalities—Deep Relaxation Breathing, Mindfulness Breathwork, Holotropic Breathwork, Yogic Breathing, and Sudarshan Kriya Yoga—are becoming more widespread in the mental health counseling environment (Aideyan, Martin, & Beeson, 2020). The role of the breath in somatic experience is a fascinating and multi-faceted one, but most of our knowledge about rhythmic variations and emotions comes from clinical reports. Common patterns are panting in fear, anger, or sexual arousal; yawning in boredom; sighing in relief from an emotional stressor; gasping in surprise or shock; rapid breathing in excitement or with laughter, etc. The study of emotional breathing patterns has only generated moderate interest in the sciences for a variety of reasons. Measuring breathing rates is technically difficult and complicated by the fact that breathing in relation to emotions is a complex process (Boiten, Frijda, & Wientjes, 1994). Emotional respiratory responses are influenced by the neural activities of the brain stem and higher cortical centers including the limbic system (Homa & Masaoka, 2008).
Three Models of Emotions versus Body States
The study of breathing and emotions occurs within the context of three theoretical models. The first model is the undifferentiated arousal model which states that autonomic responses increase as a function of emotional intensity but that their pattern is undifferentiated across emotions. This means that body arousal increases with emotional intensity, but the physical arousal is systemically homogenous. The strong and consistent finding from this research is that emotional feelings increase following a stimulus-condition. This model asserts that the arousal stimulus must be consciously perceived and identified with a given emotional state.
A second model is the cognitive appraisal model that asserts that emotional body experiences bodily are caused by how the stimulus is cognitively identified. A specific appraisal induces specific body changes. Different appraisals result from different arousal states and so have different patterns of body changes. The cognitive appraisal is the driving force behind the emotional response.
The third model—central network model—states that emotions are centrally organized by neural networks that connect the different emotion components together. Researchers differ on the nature of these networks. Some believe they are innate neural mechanisms while others argue they are cognitive schemata that develop as a function of personal experience and learning. Regardless if the emotional experience is driven by neural structures or cognitive beliefs, they all believe that body changes differ by emotion and that activation of the body state associated with an emotion is the emotion. This means that a specific emotion could be induced by manipulating one’s body state, outside of this person’s awareness of the process. Evidence for this comes from the facial feedback hypothesis which states that activation of muscles and breathing patterns associated with a given emotion will induce that emotion.
(Phillipot, Chapelle & Blairy, 2010).
Negative Emotions
Negative emotions are an unconscious burden. They drain our energy leaving us empty, lonely, and without pleasure. Negative emotions are marked by increased respiratory rates or depth of breathing. Anger followed by fear increases the breath rate the most. Stress also increases rate and depth, but rate and depth do not necessarily correspond to other negative emotions as in the case of depression. Negative feelings such as anger and resentment give us a sense of power and righteous elation in wanting to strike back in vengeance. They fill us with dark energy and inflate our bodies. They harden the body boundary and slowly sap us of energy. Negative emotions fade in time because it is difficult to energetically sustain them. Sadder emotions dealing with loss, heartbreak, disappointment, rejection, and failure leave us feeling empty, alone, lost and somatically deflated.
Positive Emotions
Positive feelings give us strength. They are enlivening with experiences of pleasure, completion, and joy. There are very few studies of breathing patterns in positive emotional states. The typically assumed pattern is one of slow, relaxed, deep breath except in the cases of positive excitement such as joy and surprise. Positive emotions inflate our body structures with good energy, positive thoughts, and the lightness of healthy being. Both types of emotional states are reflected in our breathing. Breathing patterns in general may be grouped into four types: (a) fast and deep, (b) fast and shallow, (c) slow and deep, and (d) slow and shallow. Here are the breathing measurements of six emotions demonstrating these four patterns.
- 1st line: Tenderness. Slow and shallow.
- 2nd line: Erotic love. Rapid and shallow with sporadic peaks.
- 3rd line: Anger. Rapid and deep.
- 4th line: Fear. Deep and very rapid.
- 5th line: Joy laughter. Begins slowly and somewhat deep and then moves into very rapid and shallow.
- 6th line: Sadness crying. Deep with rapid, jagged fluctuations.
How is the Breath Related to the Emotions?
It’s interesting that a primary physiological process for maintaining homeostasis is also a key feature of emotional experience. This makes sense from both a basic view of organismic survival which later evolved into a higher-order, spiritual relationship. Almost all sensory modalities including the somatosensory system are associated with responding to fear. Fear behaviors—fight, flight, or freeze—are initiated by amygdala, hypothalamus, and brain stem. Fear activates sudden and dramatic physical responses so it is only natural that breath rates and depth need to compensate for these demands (Homma & Masoaka, 2008). Next, as the respiratory system is the only one under both conscious and unconscious control it can be used to influence body states in the service of spiritual development.
The ancient yogis were very wise in this regard. Yoga is based on conscious breathing (pranayama) and postures (asanas) to prepare an adept’s body for spiritual development. Mindful awareness is an inherent feature of yoga practice whether that is concentration on body awareness, breath flow, or meditation upon some object such as a mantra. Several studies have shown that yoga practice affects brain activity and development. For example, one study using fMRI of yoga subjects and a control group found that yogins exhibited less emotional reactivity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to negative visual images whereas the control group subjects displayed the opposite response. These findings suggest that yoga practitioners exhibit limbic reactivity to negative emotional stimuli these negative reactions do not affect later mood states (Froeliger et al., 2012).
Closing Thoughts
In closing, the breath reflects emotional body experience and so influences somatopsychic experience on its own. The continued study of the relationship between the breath and the bodymind is expected to lead to improvements in mind-body medicine, somatic clinical psychotherapy, biofeedback technology, and personal health maintenance (Ravinder & Beveridge, 2020).
I’ll be writing more about these subjects in the future. Please be sure to visit the CBE occasionally to stay on top of the latest developments.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
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References
Aideyan, B., Martin, G., & Beeson, E. (2020). A practitioner’s guide to breathwork in clinical mental health counseling. Journal of Mental Health Counseling 42(1), p. 78-94.
Bass, C. & Gardner, W. (1985). Emotional influences on breathing and breathlessness. Journal of Psychosomatic Research 29(6), p. 599-609.
Bloch, S., Lemeignan, M., & Aguilera-T, N. (1991). Specific respiratory patterns distinguish among human basic emotions. International Journal of Psychophysiology 11, p. 141-154.
Boiten, F., Frijda, N., & Wientjes, C. (1994). Emotions and respiratory patterns: Review and critical analysis. International Journal of Psychophysiology 17, p. 103-128.
Froeliger, B., Garland, E., Modlin, L., & McClernon, F. (2012). Neurocognitive correlates of the effects of yoga meditation practice on emotion and cognition: A pilot study. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 6, p. 1-11.
Hameed, R., Sabir, M., Fadhel,M., Al-Shamma, O., & Alzubaidi, L. (2019). Human emotion classification based on respiration signal. ICICT ’19: Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communication Technology, p. 239-245,
Homma, I. & Masaoka, Y. (2008). Breathing rhythms and emotions. Experimental Physiology 93(3), p. 1011-1021.
Levenson. R., Ekman. P., and Friesen, W. (1990) Voluntary facial action generates emotion-specific autonomic nervous system activity. Psychophysiology 27, p. 363-384,
Philippot, P., Chapelle, G., & Blairy, S. (2010). Respiratory feedback in the generation of emotion. Cognition and Emotion 5, p. 605-627.
Ravinder, J. & Beveridge, C. (2020). Respiratory rhythm, autonomic modulation, and the spectrum of emotions: The future of emotion recognition and modulation. Frontiers in Psychology, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01980.