How Breathing Deeply Can Reduce Pain

How breathing deeply can reduce pain. Breathing slowly could be as good as some medicines at banishing pain.

Taking half as many breaths as normal not only reduces short-term pain from burns or cuts, but could help thousands who suffer chronic aches in their joints and muscles.

In a new study people were able to put up with higher levels of pain and for longer if they practised controlled breathing sessions in which they halved their breathing rates.

Most healthy adults take between 12 and 18 breaths a minute.

Take a deep breath: Studies show it can reduce pain

But new research shows that slowing this down to as few as six a minute can have a powerful pain-busting effect. U.S. researchers studied a group of healthy middle-aged women and a group of women with fibromyalgia - a condition that causes pain and for which there is no obvious cause.

Both groups were exposed to probes that generated heat against their hands at different temperatures.

Scientists wanted to measure how much pain they could tolerate.

Taking half the amount of normal breaths, both groups of women rated the pain as less intense than when they breathed normally.

One theory is that slow breathing reduces pain by having a direct effect on the sympathetic nervous system - fibres in the central nervous system which help to control blood flow and skin temperature.

Studies have shown that dampening down the sympathetic nervous system can block pain. ( dailymail.co.uk)