Connor Beaton explains how breathwork affects the nervous system, arguing that shallow, rapid breathing activates the sympathetic nervous system and that deliberate deep breathing can lower baseline physiological 'revs' (stress/arousal) early in the day.
Breath work is powerful because as you start to kind of get into this, right, if you have a very high breath and you're not deeply breathing, that is actually putting your nervous system, it's activating your sympathetic nervous system automatically.
So if you wake up in the morning and you don't stretch and you don't breathe a little bit deeply, you are automatically sort of starting off the day with a higher sympathetic nervous system, right? So you're kind of revving a little bit higher. So you can imagine you go out, you start your car, and the revs on your car already at sort of like 3 or 4,000, right? You turn it on. It's like it's a little stressed out already. You haven't even got to work. You haven't even talked to the kids. It's already there. And so doing this breath work allows those revs in your internal system to start to come down.
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