Why You Really Don’t Want to Breathe Like a Baby (Part 1)

"Watch a baby breathe” has become one of the most ubiquitous clichés in yoga, breathwork and mind-body circles. The trope is that babies breathe naturally: their bellies rise and fall, their diaphragms are working properly, and they haven’t yet acquired the tension, stress and bad habits that supposedly cause adults to breathe incorrectly. “If only we could recover that original pattern,” the story goes, “we’d breathe the way nature intended.”

OK…here’s the cueing for actually breathing like an infant: 

• Increase you breathing rate to 40–60 times per minute
• Begin your next inhalation before you’ve completely finished exhaling
• Partially constrict your airway as you breathe out
• Continue engaging your diaphragm during expiration to keep your lungs from losing too much volume.

See if you can do that for even a few breaths.

Why are you breathing this way? Because your immature lung tissue is considerably stiffer than an adult’s, while your rib cage is dramatically less stiff. Your airway is narrower and more collapsible, your respiratory muscles are less efficient and more easily fatigued, and your oxygen requirements relative to your size are substantially higher. None of this means you are bad at breathing. You are very good at solving the respiratory challenges that come with being a baby.

Those same features help explain why babies look like such convincing models of “belly breathing.” Their highly compliant rib cages provide relatively little resistance to the inward pull generated by the contracting diaphragm, and their more horizontally oriented ribs give the diaphragm less mechanical advantage for expanding the chest. Much of the visible shape change therefore occurs below the rib cage, as the descending diaphragm displaces the abdominal contents and the belly moves outward while pulling the ribcage inward.

There’s another anatomical difference contributing to what we see: an infant’s liver is proportionately much larger than an adult’s. During fetal life, the liver receives a substantial share of the highly oxygenated blood from the placenta, and its relative size at birth reflects its important role in producing red blood cells during fetal development. Sitting immediately beneath the diaphragm, this large, relatively incompressible organ directly transmits diaphragmatic movement into the abdomen.

So the prominent movement of a baby’s belly isn’t evidence of an ideal breathing pattern. It’s what breathing looks like when a diaphragm operates inside a very immature breathing apparatus.

The mistaken idea that we should breathe like infants starts with equating visible belly movement with proper diaphragmatic breathing. But diaphragmatic breathing and abdominal breathing are not synonyms.

Depending on what is stabilized and what is free to move, the diaphragm can produce movement in the abdomen, the rib cage or both. If the rib cage is relatively stabilized and the abdominal wall is free, diaphragmatic contraction can produce prominent belly movement. If the abdomen is stabilized and the ribs are free, the same diaphragm can mobilize the rib cage.

As one of many possible breathing patterns, “abdominal” breathing can be an extremely useful practice for many people, particularly while lying down and relaxing, but its usefulness doesn’t make it universally correct for everyone. And, any pattern, regardless of how useful it may be in a particular context, could not be the proper way to be breathing all the time.

Babies are supposed to outgrow baby breathing

As the breathing mechanism develops, the ribs change orientation, the respiratory muscles mature, the airways enlarge and stabilize, and the child begins sitting, standing, walking and eventually running. Breathing becomes integrated with an upright body continually negotiating gravity, posture and movement.

Adult breathing isn’t a corrupted version of infant breathing any more than adult walking is a corrupted version of crawling. Babies are supposed to outgrow both.

Yet we have a persistent tendency to romanticize infancy as the time before we were corrupted by stress, habit and culture. We see the soft belly moving under a sleeping baby’s pajamas and imagine we’re witnessing the “original” breathing the rest of us somehow forgot. But the baby isn’t using a technique. It is simply breathing according to the anatomy, physiology and metabolic demands of the body it inhabits.

So, what can we learn from the way babies breathe?

There is something worth learning from babies after all, but it isn’t their breathing pattern. It’s their complete fidelity to the body they actually inhabit. A baby has no theory about how breathing ought to look and no ideal pattern it is trying to reproduce.

We adults do. We can decide the belly should move and the chest shouldn’t, that breathing should always be slow and deep, or that relaxation means eliminating muscular effort. We can become so committed to what we think natural breathing should look like that we override the adaptability that actually makes breathing natural.

That doesn’t mean we should simply leave our breathing alone. Adults certainly can become unnecessarily rigid, habitually guarded and limited in their breathing options. Learning breathing techniques can help us to release and activate the abdominal wall and diaphragm, move the ribs more freely and recover spaces that have stopped participating in respiration.  All of this can be enormously useful—even transformational. The point is to recover choices, not replace one habitual pattern in which we are stuck with another.

Sthira and sukha

Patañjali’s complementary qualities of sthira and sukha provide a useful framework for understanding this. Sthira conveys stability, firmness and support, while sukha conveys ease, freedom and spaciousness.

In an infant, the relatively stiff, less-compliant lungs provide plenty of sthira, while the extremely compliant, easily deformable rib cage provides an abundance of sukha. From the standpoint of efficient breathing, each quality in a baby is pretty much the opposite of what we find in mature bodies.

My teacher Desikachar rendered sukha and sthira beautifully as “relaxation without dullness, alertness without tension.” Applied to breathing, healthy respiration isn’t maximizing either relaxation or effort; it’s about finding an appropriate relationship between the two. Sometimes we need more freedom, sometimes more support.

The goal isn’t to recover a breathing pattern we supposedly possessed before life taught us to breathe incorrectly. The goal of breath practice is to encourage enough respiratory resilience so that our bodies have the support and freedom we need for whatever the present moment requires.

Bottom line: Babies are very good at breathing like babies. The next time someone suggests you to breathe like one, remember that you already did—and then you grew up.

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