How Slow Breathing Helps You Focus at Work

The immediate benefits of breathwork and meditation to your focus and attention at work.

It can be almost impossible to do deep focused work, and stay there, if you are feeling anxious, irritable, or have a thousand thoughts permeating your mind. The physiological lifespan of an emotion is actually just 90 seconds, but we tend to ruminate and hold on to the emotion and the thoughts it triggers for hours.

Aside from movement, sunlight, and other interventions, breathwork offers us a fast-track to getting past these debilitating emotions and thoughts, and restoring calm to the body and mind.

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Breathwork

Numerous studies vouch for the role that deep and slow breathing can play in changing our disposition towards the world around us.

Slow, deep breathing essentially taps into our parasympathetic nervous system — responsible for restoring the body to a calm and composed state, contrary to the sympathetic nervous system which triggers the stress response and prepares the body for fight or flight.

A 2015 review published in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience looked at 15 articles and concluded that slow breathing techniques (defined as less than 10 breaths per minute) promotes:

• increases heart rate variability, a sign of fitness that primes your body to tolerate stress and perform at a higher level
• slows down the heart rate
• an increase in alpha waves in the brain and a decrease in theta waves, leaving us physically and mentally relaxed
• Increased activity in the prefrontal cortex which is fundamental to attention, impulse inhibition, and reason.

Interestingly, when we breathe out, our heart rate falls, and when we breathe in, it increases. This is known as respiratory sinus arrhythmia, but perhaps more importantly, it is a useful tool at your disposal in any moment.