H for Health
The average person can survive for weeks without food, about a week without water, but only 5 to 10 minutes without oxygen. This highlights the critical importance of our breath to our bodies. In fact, we take 20,000 to 25,000 breaths a day. This offers us a powerful way to deeply influence our bodies and bodily systems by becoming aware of and working with our breath and how we breathe.
Our Breath Operates on Autopilot
Let’s delve into this a bit more. Breathing is part of the autonomic nervous system, meaning that this part of the nervous system works without our conscious awareness, and we usually don’t have control over its functions. This is largely true for breathing. For most of us, our breath runs on autopilot, and we are not consciously aware of how we are breathing unless we’re climbing stairs and start gasping for air.