Begin with breath

Eat, Sleep, and Breathe... but where do you start?

Feb 23, 2025

Over the last few weeks, I've started to lay the groundwork for the theme of Eat, Sleep and Breathe. I talked a little bit about gut biomes, the importance of sleep, and the importance of breathing. I also wrote a little about neurotransmitters and hormones, and how they affect our ability to eat, sleep, and breathe, and conversely, how our sleep cycle, diet, and respiration effect our neurochemistry. So now it's time to get practical and put some of the theory into practice. But where do you start?

The Catch-22 of changing your neurochemistry

You're caught in the middle of a feedback loop. Your neurochemistry affects your lifestyle, and your lifestyle effects your neurochemistry. And of course, all the different elements are interrelated. Your diet affects your sleep, and your sleep affects your diet. If you're not eating right, you can't sleep properly, and if you don't sleep properly, you make poor diet choices.1 Breaking that cycle isn’t simply a matter of being strong-willed: you have to adjust the chemical algorithm that unconsciously determines your actions.

This can appear to be an impossible situation. If you can't fix your diet until you fix your sleep, but you can't fix your sleep until you fix your diet, it's a Catch-22 situation. If you try to do everything all at once, and completely change your life style, you're almost certainly be completely overwhelmed and give up.

And to make things worse, if you try and fail, it can make you feel even worse, resulting in low self-esteem, depression, and so on. You’re far more likely to succeed if you make changes gradually and think of things as a long-term process. It's like weight loss. Crash diets can deliver immediate results, but they almost always end up causing weight gain in the long term.2 Baby steps are usually more effective.3

Take a deep breath… then another one

My suggestion is to start with breathwork. Just to be clear, this is only a suggestion. It works for me, but you may find a different approach works better.

There are several reasons why I recommend starting with breathwork.

It's the least disruptive. You don't have to change your lifestyle in any way, you just need to set aside five or ten minutes every day for a moment of quiet relaxation. You can do it anywhere, anytime, whenever and wherever it's most convenient for you: at the start of the day, the end of the day, on your lunch break, sitting in a parking lot, on a bench in a park, while watching TV, literally anywhere.

It also doesn't disrupt the lifestyles of other members of the family. You're not asking anyone else to change their diet, or eat separate meals, or alter their daily routine or sleep schedule to fit in with you. Breathwork is something you can do without their involvement.

It's easy. Anyone can breathe in and out while counting. You don't have to figure out a complicated diet plan, change your shopping and cooking habits, or figure out how to adjust your day to day life to accommodate a different sleep cycle.

You can literally start doing it today - right now - without any kind of preparation or planning. It doesn't require any training, any equipment, or anything else. And of course, it doesn't cost anything at all.

It's a great way to start making a mental shift towards self-care. Getting into the habit of spending a few minutes a day sitting and breathing mindfully is a way telling yourself that looking after yourself is important to you and that taking a brief time out to deal with stress it's a priority in your life.

Once you’ve begin to make that mental shift, it becomes much easier to incorporate new lifestyle changes that require a greater commitment, such as changing your diet, going to bed at a different time, or taking more exercise.

You get results fast. Breathwork will deliver benefits fairly rapidly in the form of decreased stress, decreased blood pressure, and so on. It won't be instant, but many people report feeling the benefits within a few weeks.4

This will have an immediate effect on the quality of your sleep, if not the duration, which gives you a way to disrupt that sleep/diet feedback loop. As your sleep improves, thanks to your breathwork practice, you can start making changes to your diet. As your diet improves, so will your sleep. That'll give you the motivation to start making lifestyle choices around sleep routines, exercise, and so on.

You can build on a simple foundation. Once you’re used to box breathing and other basic techniques, you can start stepping up your breathwork practice by adding other routines.

Something that worked for me was to start doing Tai Chi or Qigong, incorporating movement with breathwork. I also took up yin yoga, which incorporates stretching and flexibility with breathwork,5 and also yoga nidra, which is a semi-sleep state that promotes deep relaxation.6

As I said above, this may not be your preferred methodology. If you want to start by changing your diet, or focusing on sleep, or doing everything all at once, then go for it. Whatever you’re most committed to is most likely to deliver results for you. But if you're stuck trying to figure out where to start, I'd say give breathwork a try.

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