Learning to breathe

For something so basic to health, good breathing doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Niki Bezzant finds out where we’re going wrong.

If social media and the wellness press is to be believed, most of us are walking around performing one of our most fundamental bodily functions incorrectly. “You’re probably breathing wrong” go the headlines and YouTube descriptions.

It’s enticing clickbait. How could I be breathing wrong? Isn’t it involuntary? Is this another thing I need to worry about perfecting? And yet it’s believable enough: on any given day you could find a fair chunk of the people around you complaining of fatigue, brain fog, poor digestion or aching muscles – all things that are attributed to breathing incorrectly. It’s a thing that sounds, in the words of comedian Stephen Colbert, truthy enough.

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