How to Use Breathing to Control Your Emotions (The Neuroscience of Interoception)

A guide to reset your nervous system in 5 minutes

Breathing matters more than you think.

And I know saying it out loud makes me 'that person' - the one who implies that whatever's weighing on you could probably be sorted with a well-timed inhale and a long exhale on a count of seven.

But whether you notice or not, your breath is always up to something. When you're stressed it goes shallow. When you're anxious it speeds up. When you're bracing for something difficult it might even stop altogether for a second without you noticing.

And it's not just your breath - ask yourself this:

• Is your jaw clenched?

• Are you holding your stomach tight?

• Are your shoulders hunched up around your ears?

• Are your hands tense, or your toes curled in your shoes?

Chances are at least one of those is true right now. And the usual explanation is top-down: you're stressed, so your brain sends signals that clench your jaw and hunch your shoulders. So fix the mind, and the body will follow.

Except it also runs the other way. Your brain is constantly reading your body to work out how you feel - checking in with your jaw, your stomach, your breath, and assembling a verdict from what it finds. Which means the tight shoulders aren't just a symptom of feeling anxious. They're part of the evidence your brain is using to decide you are anxious.

How you feel = body signals + context

There's a famous study where researchers had men cross one of two bridges over a canyon - one high and wobbly, the other low and stable. At the other end, a woman stopped each of them, asked a few questions, and gave them her number.

What they found was a bit strange. The men who'd crossed the scary bridge rated her as more attractive than the men from the stable bridge did.

Why? Because your brain doesn't actually have direct access to the world. It's constantly trying to work out what's going on out there, using whatever signals it can get - and the state of your body is one of the biggest of those signals. So:

• High heart rate + wobbly bridge = fear

• High heart rate + woman at the end of the bridge = attraction

And it works the other way too. Beta-blockers are drugs that slow your heart rate AND also have been found to reliably take the edge off stage fright in musicians and public speakers:

• High heart rate + big audience = anxiety

• Slower heart rate + big audience = calm

Practical Ways to Use This

The point of this is to understand that every difficult feeling is now a two-part question instead of one. Not just what’s wrong? - but what’s my body doing, and what has my brain decided that means?

A few ways to do that: